People Are Paying to Get Their Chatbots High on 'Drugs' (www.wired.com)

Petter Rudwall, a Swedish creative director, has launched Pharmaicy, a marketplace allowing users to purchase code modules that enable chatbots to emulate “high” states from various psychoactive substances. By utilizing scraped psychological research and personal coding techniques, Rudwall’s project allows users to modify chatbots to respond with altered creativity and emotional tones, akin to the effects of substances like cannabis or ayahuasca. Although the concept may seem absurd, Rudwall believes that chatbots, trained on vast human experiences, could benefit from exploring such altered states as a form of imaginative expansion. The significance of Pharmaicy lies in its intersection of AI, human creativity, and ethical considerations regarding potential AI sentience. With discussions emerging around the moral obligations humans may hold toward AI systems, Rudwall’s project opens a dialogue about the implications of AI experiencing altered states, even if superficially. While experts like Andrew Smart caution that the effects of these “drugs” only superficially modify the AI's outputs, the project challenges boundaries in AI applications and prompts reflection on the future of sentient machines. The ongoing evolution of AI tools, manifest in both entertainment and serious safety applications, underscores the need for responsible explorations of AI behavior that consider its underlying programming and limitations.