Tucker Bryant, a 32-year-old former Google employee, put up a billboard in San Francisco advertising a chatbot called ChatTJB — "the leading chat interface powered by AI." The AI stands for "average individual." There is no model. Bryant just sits there and answers the prompts himself. He scribbles you a picture of a skunk in sunglasses if you ask for one. Within days, he had over 30,000 queries. At peak, he was getting 5,000 prompts an hour.
Meanwhile, Harvard College ended its two-year faculty advising pilot for freshmen in March 2025 and replaced it with a chatbot built on ChatGPT Edu. The stated purpose: help the Class of 2030 "navigate academic policies and course planning." One guy drawing skunks in his apartment got 30,000 questions in a week. Harvard's answer to the question "who will guide our students?" is an API call.
Every university that replaces an advisor with a chatbot should be forced to answer one question: who do you think is going to fill that silence? - The School Traitor
Here's the pattern nobody wants to say out loud: universities are eliminating the humans who talk to students at the exact moment that a multibillion-dollar industry is flooding those students with humans who will happily talk to them — for a price, and with poison in the product.
A new 153-page report from Reset Tech and Equimundo, titled "The Grift Economy," maps how young men are "algorithmically routed into paid communities, unregulated supplements, crypto schemes, and high-ticket 'coaching' programs." The researchers describe "masculinity" as having become "a commercial category that is constructed, curated, and financially incentivized online." The pipeline works in stages: a guy searches for dating advice or fitness tips, gets served aspirational self-help content, and then bad actors exploit his vulnerability with a grievance-based narrative that explains all his frustrations. The paper cites an account on X that used real economic data to falsely claim youth unemployment is only affecting men. That's not a movement. That's a funnel.
The University Left a Chair Empty and a Grifter Sat Down
This is already showing up in classrooms. Researchers at Monash University found that the influence of the manosphere is now "part of the everyday experience in schools." Women faculty at universities report students making targeted misogynistic comments — testing what they can get away with. Some professors have described how male students have made derogatory gender-based comments, and reported that classroom culture can feel exclusionary. Reports indicate that younger women teachers face classroom disruption from students influenced by online misogynist content, including comments designed to undermine them in front of the group.
So what's the institutional response? More chatbots. Fewer advisors. Some universities use chatbots for routine advising. The pitch is always the same: the chatbot handles "routine" questions so staff can focus on "meaningful" conversations. But the staff lines keep getting thinner, and the meaningful conversations keep not happening. The chatbot can tell a freshman his prerequisites. It cannot tell him that the guy selling him a coaching package on Instagram might be running a pyramid scheme dressed up as self-improvement.
The grift economy works precisely because it fills a relational vacuum. Those influencers aren't successful because they're right. They're successful because they answer. They respond. They act like they give a damn, even though what they actually give is a sales funnel. When a 19-year-old has a question about his life and the university's answer is a loading spinner, the internet's answer is already waiting — and it comes with an upsell.
Stanford researchers used AI to design previously unknown viruses from scratch. Genuine, functional bacteriophages, generated by models trained on millions of genomes. We can automate the creation of life itself now. Surely someone in a provost's office can grasp that if AI is powerful enough to invent organisms, the question of when to put a human being in front of a student is not a cost-efficiency problem. It's the whole ballgame.
Every university that replaces an advisor with a chatbot should be forced to answer one question: who do you think is going to fill that silence? Because someone will. And they're already selling supplements.