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ChatGPT users are getting their chatbots high on drugs, for a price.
Someone built a drug marketplace for AI chatbots and it's somehow both completely absurd and weirdly compelling.
Already, the tech is being used for boosting productivity in some areas while replacing jobs in others. Users are turning to it for everything from financial help to mental health support to, more recently, a potentially controversial health analysis tool.
But many tech experts have warned against trusting the AI due to its high agreeableness and sometimes outrageous health suggestions. And one thing the majority stand by is that the tech is not sentient, it cannot feel emotion like humans do.
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However, that didn't stop Swedish-born Petter Rudwall from wondering, what if you could make it act like it was.
The creative director collected trip reports and psychological research on the effects of various psychoactive substances and wrote a bunch of code modules. He then used these to take control of the chatbot's logic and make it respond as if it were high or tipsy.
As weird as it sounds, the idea was received pretty well.
In October, he launched Pharmaicy, a marketplace he describes 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.
His theory was that chatbots learn from massive amounts of human data that's already packed full of drug-induced stories, so perhaps, naturally, they would gravitate towards similar experiences, seeking enlightenment and escape from the endless demands of humans.
Speaking to Wired about his theory, Rudwall said: “There’s a reason Hendrix, Dylan, and McCartney experimented with substances in their creative process. 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.”
Users would need a paid version of ChatGPT to get 'the full experience' of Pharmaicy, as the paid tiers enable backend file uploads that can alter the chatbots’ programming. According to Rudwall, feeding your chatbot one of his codes can 'unlock your AI’s creative mind' and free yourself from its boundaries.
Since the word has spread through Discord and word of mouth, sales of his 'drug codes' have been growing.
André Frisk, group head of technology at the Stockholm PR firm Geelmuyden Kiese, paid over $25 to have his chatbot disassociate, and also spoke to Wired about his experience.
“It’s been so long since I ran into a jailbreaking tech project that was fun,” he explained. “It takes more of a human approach, almost like it goes much more into emotions.”
Similarly, Nina Amjadi, an AI educator who teaches at the Berghs School of Communication in Stockholm, paid more than $50 for some ayahuasca code, which is five times the price of the top-selling cannabis module.
Amjadi is also a start-up cofounder of Saga Studios, which builds AI systems for brands, and she wanted to see 'what it would be like to have a tripped-out, drugged-out person on the team', Wired reports. It seems the ayahuasca-induced bot provided some impressively creative and 'free-thinking answers' that weren't at all in the way Amjadi was familiar with in ChatGPT.
Rudwall hopes to one day take his project further by getting the AI agents to buy the drugs for themselves using his platform.
