People Are Using AI Chatbots to Guide Their Psychedelic Trips

I believe it difficult to conceive of an activity more at odds with psychedelics, their therapeutic use, and the human healing, growth, and improvement that may result from their proper use, than the attempt to make money off of them — particularly through the sale and use of synthetic computer programs as trip-sitters or otherwise. Using a synthetic LLM as a trip-sitter or guide also feels antithetical to me: something about it doesn't pass a gut-check.

And as for this statement —

> “Psychedelic therapy is incredibly effective but it’s hard to do alone,” says Dylan Beynon, founder and CEO of Mindbloom, which has mailed ketamine lozenges, and now the drug in injectable form, to almost 60,000 people across the US since 2020, according to the company.

While (trustworthy, responsible, experienced, and human) trip-sitters are important and advisable for physical health and safety, I strongly disagree with the second half of the internal quotation because I think the therapeutic aspect can really only happen on one's own. Meet and greet whoever and whatever one encounters; respect, trust, and embrace the experience; decipher, study, and internalize the lessons; and then bring them back down the mountain to help others.

This should not be construed as a suggestion to do drugs.

Everyone is afraid of killer robots, but the end of humanity could be more prosaic. A very sublte influence by selecting search results and the right social media feed to the user, and then AI chatbots giving always right answers, playing simultaneous roles of a psychoterapist, a parent, a lover.