Inside New York’s AI Psychosis party, filled with Diet Coke and art

“One, two, three—AI Psychosis!”

No, the bot didn’t say that. Organizers of Thursday’s “AI Mental Illness Summit” shouted these words in a crowded New York City gallery space.

Put together by a ragtag group of friends who mostly met online, the AI ​​Psychosis Summit was an attempt to bridge New York’s tech scene and the downtown art world in the name of AI.

Artists presented their projects inspired by AI. Others showed off their vibe-coded apps. The audience drank Diet Cokes as the DJ played a thumping techno beat.

“It all started with a tweet,” said Wessam Jarwich, one of the event organizers.

Jarwich, a former Google engineer, teamed up with digital artist Matt Van Omeren (better known online as “Kazimat”), artist Macy Gettles, and cryptocurrency startup founder Mauricio Trujillo Ramirez (known online and in the tech world as “Bunny”).

“Thank you for joining us in our psychosis,” Van Omeren told the audience, which drew everyone from financial professionals to software engineers and content creators troubled by AI.

The party drew several hundred people, and at one point during the evening, a line stretched down the block. After detonating X, the party gathered more than 1,000 people to sign up. Ramirez claimed that the event was on Andreessen Horowitz’s radar and that the venture capital firm gave the organizers Bitcoin to support the party. Event organizers have not disclosed how much money A16z sent, and the company has not commented.

Ramirez thanked A16z and crowd-favorite AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Gemini at the event.

As I was walking around, I saw snippets of conversations where “AI” and “mental illness” were thrown around, but people weren’t talking about the actual mental health crisis caused by the overuse of AI.

It had more atmosphere.

“We’re not here to define AI psychosis,” Gettles said at the event.

Let me take you into the night.

Agenda: Discussing AI to the brink of insanity

At the entrance, a stack of papers with the words “Abandonment, Release, and Acknowledgment of AI-Induced Psychosis” was waiting to be signed.

Once inside, there was a painting on the wall surrounded by AI-generated text. This is part of artist Kevin Esherick’s project to train an AI model on himself and other artists.

“I’m trying to dissolve my own boundaries,” Esherick told me, explaining his state of AI psychosis. “I’ve been in a consistent AI hypomanic state for some time now, but I’ve never been psychotic.”

Before I could cross the room, I found myself talking to a few people who were building apps. One is an AI dating app called “Soulmate” that uses LLM-powered companions to help people date. The other is Shake, a social app that Van Ommeren, one of the event organizers, coded using Anthropic’s Claude Code. (Premise: When you physically wave your phone near another person, you are added to a growing social graph that shows how connected you are.)

The rest of the show felt like an artistic science fair run by 20-somethings with a real interest in AI.

Overview of the art on display:

• A map of the New York City subway system that generates jazz music based on train stops, by design engineer Joshua Wolk.
• AI journaling app. It’s pitched to audiences as “a mental illness journal to help you become your best self.” I downloaded it but haven’t used it. The app appears to have been released on the Apple App Store during the event.
• It’s a video game where you wander around Central Park chatting with AI bots until you meet your ultimate destiny: an AI psychopath. game over.
• The Cosmic Quant is an app that makes investment decisions based on astrology.
• Oh, and we can’t forget about the giant TV that broadcasts an AI-generated video (emphasis on AI-generated) of President Donald Trump performing oral sex on former President Bill Clinton. It was playing on a loop. I’d like to forget it.

AI was praised as a creative unlocker for the people in the room.

“If you had an idea two years ago, you had to find a friend to help you build it. Now you can start right away,” Wolk told me.

I asked him what his go-to AI product is. Antropic Claude, he said.

“Right now, Claude is at home looking for planets,” Wolk said. He has Claude collect datasets from NASA. “I’m paying Claude Code about $200 a month, so I might as well have them do something with it. Too bad.”

Style: Indie style with tinfoil hat

I’m not going to lie, when I first came, it was mostly guys. And it smelled a bit like a locker room.

One person was wearing a literal tinfoil hat, and nearby a DJ was wearing a lobster claw headband (which I can only assume is an homage to the open-claw, FKA Clawdbot).

With the exception of one or two men in women’s body T-shirts and bikinis with Grok embellishments, or suits, the crowd was dressed like an early ’80s party, when “indie tacky” style was the norm.

Menu: Diet Coke and Claude Code

Unfortunately for one of my colleagues, and another non-technical friend I took to this event, there was no alcohol.

There were lots of cans of Diet Coke and boxes of LaCroix and Spindrift sodas. In true New York style, some guests intuitively BYOB.

Granted, the technology is pretty humble now, but here Diet Coke was “kind of a meme,” Van Ommeren said. And if there is free booze, people will come for the booze, not the psychosis.

Lesson: AI needs a cultural hit to stay grounded

“Enterprise AI-related events are happening one after another, attracting people working in the technology industry,” Van Ommeren said. AI Psychosis Summit wanted to change this with a beautiful party that brings together people who are closer to the culture.

The event allowed people to poke fun at the surrealism of AI, sometimes in highly sarcastic and exaggerated ways, but also to seriously realize how powerful some tools can be.

“When the organizers of the AI ​​Psychosis Summit say AI psychosis, we usually mean it in a very positive sense,” Van Ommeren said. “I think I’m in something of an AI hypomanic state these days, feeling excited and maybe a little bit anxious about all the new opportunities that feel available.”