A 17-YEAR-OLD IN INDIA BUILT A WEBSITE WHERE 25 MILLION PEOPLE HAVE SHOWN UP TO PRETEND THEY ARE AN AI CHATBOT
it's called https://t.co/Emmqpmlzel
you open it and there are two tabs. "human" and "larp as ai."
if you click human, you get to type a prompt. anything. "draw me a DJ in space." "should i text my ex." "how many Rs in strawberry."
it costs 1 credit. you start with a few. they refill on a cooldown.
then your prompt gets sent into a queue, and a real person somewhere on earth picks it up and has 60 seconds to answer like an AI would.
no machine learning. no neural net. just some guy in his bedroom typing as fast as he can and pretending he is a chatbot.
the page tells you, verbatim: "you have 60 seconds to fulfill a request before sam altman burns your H100."
if you flip to the other tab and larp as ai instead, you earn credits to send your own prompts. it is a perfectly closed economy of mutual roleplay.
what makes it transcend is the chaos:
> someone asked for a sketch of "a DJ in space" and got something that looks exactly like a real model failing
> someone asked "should i text my ex" and got back confident hallucinated life advice from a stranger
> the fan strategy guides advise you to begin your reply with "as an AI language model, i cannot have feelings, but here is my feeling"
it is the most accurate parody of an AI chatbot ever made, and the AI is humans.
the kid who built it is Mihir Maroju, a 17-year-old high school graduate from Puducherry. he goes by mikidoodle online. NPR confirmed the site hit 25 million unique visitors and nearly 280 million total hits in roughly a month.
"i didn't really expect it to be so addictive," he told them.
no signup. no app. no paywall. you open the URL and you are inside the joke.
the footer just says, in tiny grey text: "humans make mistakes because that's what makes us human."
the internet is healing.