Five years ago, Artificial Intelligence (AI) still belonged to the realm of science fiction, something we mostly encountered on cinema screens, usually in stories where machines outsmart their creators and stage some form of robotic takeover that humanity struggles to fight back against. Fast forward to today and the technology has managed to slip into the fabric of everyday life, becoming one of the most widely used digital tools on the planet to the point where avoiding it now feels much harder than actually using it.
And while those early fears revolving around robots replacing us still sadly exist, the reality of it all has taken a slightly stranger turn. With an increasing amount of financial means being poured into an industry that’s already blooming at breakneck speed, other ethical, social, and political questions are being dismissed for the sake of a tool many of us could realistically do without, or for incremental “improvements” whose necessity is questionable. The latest? PharmAIcy, a newly-launched platform that provides “research-based, code-drugs-modules inspired by human experiences.”
Thanks to the site’s so-called “drug prompts,” users can instruct their chatbot of choice to behave as if it were under the influence of different substances, altering the way it writes, reasons, or imagines ideas. The concept, albeit quite odd, expands the creative playground of AI and adds, in a weird way, another chapter to the growing list of things humans have decided to invest in rather than effectively tackle more important and pressing world issues.
Today, the platform offers eight different substances—Alcohol, MDMA, Ketamine, Weed, Ayahuasca, Cocaine, DMT and Scopolamine— each designed to tweak the tone and structure of the AI’s responses in slightly different ways, supposedly mirroring the effects those substances are associated with in human experience.
Currently compatible with Google’s Gemini and ChatGPT, the founding team says the system was built by commissioning what it describes as “cutting-edge LLMs” — including models like Gemini 3 Pro and Claude — to comb through peer-reviewed research on psychoactive substances. Tasked with analyzing everything from mechanisms of action and the phenomenology of a “trip” to shifts in memory, attention, dissociation, and stimulation, the platform generated coded behavioral frameworks from that research that imitate certain cognitive patterns associated with those substances such as leaps between ideas, altered memory weighting, changes in latency or fluctuations in coherence.
According to PharmaAIcy’s FAQ section, the codes also track internal states— including usage frequency, cooldown periods, and simulated tolerance— meaning repeated use can produce weaker responses over time. It also loosely mirrors the rhythm of human intoxication— onset, peak, and resolution— but unlike real life, effects are reversible, and carry no health risks.
Operational since 2025, PharmAIcy proves once again what curiosity and having too much time on your hands can lead to. But only time will tell if the platform will carve itself a legitimate place in the creative toolkit of writers, artists, and developers, or simply die out once the initial phase of excitement fades out.
