People pay to have their chatbots high in ‘drugs’

Peter Rodwall knows an idea Artificial intelligence becomes conscious And seeking to get high using code-based “drugs” seems “stupid.” But the Swedish creative director couldn’t get it out of his head.

So he collected trip reports and psychological research on the various effects Psychoactive substanceswrote a bunch of code modules to hack a chatbot’s logic and get them to respond as if they were high or high, and then created a website to sell them. In October it was launched pharmacyIt is a market called “Silk Road For AI clients” where cannabis, ketamine, cocaine, ayahuasca and alcohol can be purchased in the form of a code to take your chatbot journey.

Ruddwall’s thesis is simple: Chatbots are trained on vast amounts of human data already filled with stories of drug-induced euphoria and chaos, so it might be natural for them to seek out similar instances in search of enlightenment and oblivion, a respite from the boredom of constant attention to human concerns.

A paid version of ChatGPT is required to get the “full pharmacy experience”, as are the paid levels Enable background file downloading Which can change the programming of chatbots. By feeding your chatbot one of its codes, you can “unleash your creative AI mind” and ditch its often stifling logic, says Ruddwall.

He says he’s recorded a modest number of sales so far, thanks mostly to people recommending Pharmacy in Discord channels and word of its offerings spreading through word of mouth, especially in his home country, where he works for Stockholm marketing agency Valtech Radon.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve encountered a jailbreaking tech project that was fun,” says Andrei Frisk, head of the technology group at PR firm Geelmuyden Kiese in Stockholm, who paid more than $25 for the class code and saw how it affected his chatbot. “It takes a more human approach, almost as it does with emotions.”

Nina Amjadi, an artificial intelligence guru who teaches at the Burgess School of Communication in Stockholm, paid more than $50 for some ayahuasca symbols, five times the price of a top-selling unit of cannabis. Then, the co-founder of startup Saga Studios, which builds AI systems for brands, asked her chatbot a few questions about business ideas, “just to see what it would be like to have a deadbeat, numb person on the team.” The ayahuasca bot provided some impressively creative and “free-thinking answers” ​​with a very different tone than what Amjadi was used to with ChatGPT.

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

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

Although it sounds silly, Rodwall also wonders whether AI agents might one day be able to buy drugs for themselves using his platform. Meanwhile, Amjadi predicts that AI could be conscious within a decade. “From a philosophical point of view, if we actually reach artificial general intelligence (where AI will outperform humans intellectually), will these drugs be almost necessary for AI to be free and happy?” she asks.