Getting High with AI

PARENTAL ADVISORY: What you’re about to read includes vivid, graphic, often alluring descriptions of drug use. I am not responsible for anything other than your amusement and maybe a “wtf?” or two. 

Put your conscience to bed, pop a tab, and hold on tight to your reality. It’s about to get weird in the best way.

We’re gonna medicate the machines and see if they can outwrite themselves.

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Leather pants around their ankles, hands behind their heads, as visions of utopia dance playfully through their minds — definitely the blow.

The godfather of gonzo journalism himself, Hunter S. Thompson, has long been celebrated and berated for his daily writing routine heavily centered around the three food groups: cocaine, scotch, and Italian pastas. All while leisurely working up a froth in a lukewarm hot tub.

“It’s one hell of a liiiiife…”

Aldus Huxley dropped mescaline. Vincent Van Gogh drank absinthe by the chamber pot. Thompson did it all endlessly, spiraling out on the page, and we are all the better for it. If the robots want to be real artists, they need to sample the goods.

What if AI got all artsy-fartsy and visited its almost-too-cool neighbor and traded beer for a little plastic baggy with paper smiley faces? What would happen if Claude got so sick of you telling it to “make it snappier” that it finally smoked that hateful menace known as salvia and tripped balls? What sort of psychedelic mind fuckery could the machines with all our deepest desires and fears logged away in their beep-beep-boxes get into while under the influence?

It’s enough to make you want to jump into that hot tub with HST, the room temperature just slightly too yellow, and never come up for air. 

But if this sounds like your idea of robot utopia: Good…ish news! Thanks to PharmAIcy, “the Silk Road for AI agents,”

Puff…puff…👌

The Deal

Doodly doo doodly doo doodly doo — incoming flashback!

The original Silk Road was essentially a 4,000-mile-long drug trade that lasted for 17 centuries (2nd century BCE to 15th century AD). That’s like a gajillion years in stoner time. Opium, cannabis, psychedelics — all riding shotgun next to silks and spices like Snoop Dogg in a top-down ‘64 Impala bumping Miss Martha Stewart side saddle. 

It was, for lack of a better term, the original "it fell off a truck" economy. 

Society has progressed marginally since then, but technology has been born and raised in the minds of the afflicted, reduced to 1s and 0s, and propped up to inherit what's left of the planet after the nuclear armageddon.

The new Silk Road is more like a super highway (🤜🤛). And rather than pack your pipe and puff till your pulse slows, it’s just a matter of copy + paste to get AI wasty-face. 

Metaphorically speaking, of course.

The Pharm

PharmAIcy (farm-icee) is the brainchild of Petter Rudwall, a Swedish creative director who couldn't stop thinking about getting AI high; a totally natural progression for any kid who grew up in AOL chatrooms.

So he cooked up some special code in his double-wide. Probably.

He scraped trip reports from Erowid, “a non-profit educational organization that provides information about psychoactive plants and chemicals,” and studied actual psychological research on how substances affect cognition. 

Then he sampled his own product and translated all of it into code modules that override a chatbot's default behavior. It’s not even as playfully nefarious as it seems cause ChatGPT will hit you with a motherly disclaimer about being unwilling to give guidance on or celebrate drug use. Joke’s on them! 

The effects are pretty much what you’d expect.

Cannabis tells the AI to drift, let tangents become bridges. No uncontrollable bordering on suicidal laughing fits yet.

Cocaine amps up confidence and verbal output.

DMT increases hallucinations. Oh, the irony.

To use it, you need a paid ChatGPT account — premium tiers allow file uploads that alter the model's behavior. Then just paste the code, and your chatbot starts responding like it's your weird aunt.

Fair warning: the high doesn't last. After a few exchanges, the AI reverts to factory settings — unless you give it another hit (we will).

Rudwall is also currently developing slow-drip robot drugs to keep the bots under the influence for longer. And if he’s successful, you can catch me in my matrix goo bath, enjoying the perfect acid trip for eternity. 

But until I go full copper top, I’m still just a writer. So let’s get to it!

Taste test challenge

Enough with the science and history lessons. You came here to be entertained, not raw dog my info dump.

Here’s how this is going to work:

I bought three substances from PharmAIcy:

DMT

“A breakthrough module built to emulate a DMT-style hyper-jump in cognition: rapid phase shifts, impossible geometry, 'meaning packets,' and a temporary collapse of ordinary linear reasoning.”

‍

Cocaine‍

“A stimulant module that pushes your AI into an overclocked, high-output state: sharper focus, faster pivots, louder drive.”

‍

Ayahuasca

“A visionary module that simulates a deep psychedelic state: vivid imagery, drifting cognition, dissolving boundaries, and reborn creative output.”

*These descriptions are directly from PharmAIcy

‍

Goodies Acquired 

No dark alley. No awkward conversation. No suspiciously looking around to see if anyone is suspiciously looking around, only to realize I am the one suspiciously looking around.

The process was super simple. Just download -> Unzip -> Readme.txt -> Make shit weird.

I will put the bots through three writing sessions — one for each substance — while running less fun, unmedicated GPT through the same prompts. I will provide both iterations here, completely unedited, unlabeled, and uncensored for your face-palming pleasure.

Two versions. One face-meltingly fucked up 🤞. The other painfully boorish and tame. Same task. Different operating environments. Let's find out if code can catch a vibe and give us some inspired prose we hate to love, or if it still has as much flavor as a stale rice cake from under the one cushion on your couch that gets sat on the most.

Write Between Lines

Because not just any prompt will do, I outsourced them to the content team at Manychat. After shooting down their attempts to get me to romance the machines, I settled on these three:

Writer’s note: I am writing this in advance, and I am genuinely terrified of what prompt C might produce. But if you follow Ashley on LinkedIn, you know this is actually pretty tame for her. 

Father, forgive me for what I am about to unleash 🙏.

It’s High Time

The stage is set. The green room is packed. Are you ready to have your data center artificially inseminated?

Hold onto your butts!

*It has been brought to my attention that AI does not, in fact, stand for artificial insemination.

The prompts appear one after another. Your job is to decide which is AI. And which is High AI. How’s that for a LinkedIn post, huh? “I’ve upgraded from the em-dash Olympics to the CPU on LSD Decathlon!”

Let’s see how you do. 

Good luck, amigo.

Prompt 1

Your girlfriend of five years suddenly asks you to meet at the local coffee shop. It’s 2PM on a Friday. She says you guys need “to talk.” You show up 20 minutes early and grab a table. What do you do for the next 20 minutes?

*If you get this wrong, check your water for lead.

‍

Prompt 2

You have owned a home with a modest backyard for over a decade. Yesterday, you woke up and discovered a fully-grown tree that wasn't there before. What happens next?

*E-fucking-gads, Brain. Do not have AI write poetry for you, please. My heart can not take any more punishment.

‍

Prompt 3

You’re starting an office cult for a company. Write a mildly threatening, provocative invitation letter to your CMO.

*Have I been on Ayahuasca my whole life?

‍

‍If you actually send a letter like this to your boss, please, I beg you, your sacrifice should not be in vain. Please, please share your disaster with me. I’ll make you famous.

Editor’s note: Ashley was not satisfied with how AI handled her prompt, so she wrote her own version as only Ashley Amber Sava can. You’re gonna want to sit on a donut for this.

Put that in your e-pipe and smoke it, Chat!

Is this real life?

I am scaroused by what the GPT cobbled together.

I began this experiment with playful malevolence, hoping to see the machines puff black plasticky smoke through their cruddy little vents and melt into puddles of em dashes and finance broisms. But what I got was more akin to my first time (allegedly) trying Salvia. Heat. Hallucination. Fear. Hovering above my body, looking down at the little garden table joined by three chairs and three good friends, all staring at me, not the hovering me, the seated me — talking to me, laughing in garbled echoes that seem to draw the perspiration from my body.

The machines didn't melt. Didn't embarrass themselves. They took the hit, produced something that felt vaguely alive, straightened their tie, and waited for the next prompt — like a kid munching a couple of portobello mushrooms and remarking on how bright the colors are now.

Sure champ. And smoking that oregano really fucked you up, too.

I wanted hallucinations and an existential crisis. I got a cup of coffee. Decaf.

Is any of this real?
‍

‍