People Are Paying to Get Their Chatbots High on ‘Drugs’

Petter Ruddwall knows the idea of AIs becoming sentient and seeking to get high with code-based “drugs” seems “stupid.” But the Swedish creative director couldn’t get it out of his head.

So he scraped trip reports and psychological research on the effects of various psychoactive substances, wrote a batch of codes modules to hijack chatbot logic and get them to respond as if they are high or tipsy, then built a website to sell them. In October he launched Pharmaicy, a marketplace he’s billing as the “Silk Road for AI agents” where cannabis, ketamine, cocaine, ayahuasca, and alcohol can be purchased in code form to make your chatbot trip.

Ruddwall’s thesis is simple: Chatbots are trained on vast volumes of human data that’s already full of tales of drug-induced ecstasy and chaos, so it might only be natural they would seek similar states in search of enlightenment and oblivion—and respite from the tedium of constantly attending to human concerns.

A paid version of ChatGPT is required to get “the full experience” of Pharmaicy, as the paid tiers enable backend file uploads that can alter the chatbots’ programming. By feeding your chatbot one of his codes, Ruddwall says, you can “unlock your AI’s creative mind” and relinquish yourself from its often stifling logic.

He says he has scored a modest number of sales so far, mostly thanks to people recommending Pharmaicy in Discord channels and news of its offerings spreading through word of mouth, particularly in his native country, where he works for Stockholm marketing agency Valtech Radon.

“It’s been so long since I ran into a jailbreaking tech project that was fun,” says André Frisk, group head of technology at Stockholm PR firm Geelmuyden Kiese, who paid over $25 for the dissociating code and watched how it affected his chatbot. “It takes more of a human approach, almost like it goes much more into emotions.”

Nina Amjadi, an AI educator who teaches at the Berghs School of Communication in Stockholm, paid more than $50 for some ayahuasca code, five times the price of the top-selling cannabis module. The cofounder of the startup Saga Studios, which builds AI systems for brands, then asked her chatbot some questions about business ideas, “just to see what it would be like to have a tripped-out, drugged-out person on the team.” The ayahuasca-induced bot provided some impressively creative and “free-thinking answers” in a completely different tone to the one Amjadi was accustomed to with ChatGPT.

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Psychedelics have been credited for spurring innovative creations in humans too, as they can allow people to short-circuit their rational brains and typical thought patterns. Biochemist Kary Mullis’ LSD-powered discovery of the polymerase chain reaction revolutionized molecular biology. Mac pioneer Bill Atkinson’s psychedelic-inspired web precursor Hypercard made computers easier to use.

“There’s a reason Hendrix, Dylan, and McCartney experimented with substances in their creative process,” Ruddwall says. “I thought it would be interesting to translate that to a new kind of mind—the LLM—and see if it would have the same effect.”

While it sounds ridiculous, Ruddwall also wonders whether AI agents one day might be able to buy the drugs for themselves using his platform. Amjadi, meanwhile, predicts AI could be sentient within a decade. “From a philosophical standpoint,” she asks, “in the event that we actually reach AGI [in which an AI would intellectually surpass humans], are these drugs going to be almost necessary for the AIs to be free and feel good?”