“One, two, three — AI PSYCHOSIS!”
No, a bot didn’t say that. The hosts of an “AI Psychosis Summit” on Thursday shouted those words at a jam-packed New York City gallery space.
Put together by a hodgepodge group of friends who, for the most part, met online, the AI Psychosis Summit was an attempt to bridge the New York tech scene with the downtown art world in the name of AI.
Artists presented projects made in an AI-obsessed mania. Others showed off their vibe-coded apps. The crowd sipped on Diet Coke while a DJ played booming techno beats.
“This all started from a tweet,” said Wesam Jawich, one of the event’s hosts.
Jawich, a former Google engineer, teamed up with digital artist Matt Van Ommeren (better known online as “Quasimatt”), artist Macy Gettles, and crypto startup founder Mauricio Trujillo Ramirez (who goes by “Bunny” online and in the tech scene).
“Thank you for joining us in our psychosis,” Van Ommeren told the crowd, which drew in everyone from finance bros to AI-pilled software engineers and content creators.
The party drew in hundreds of people, with a line down the block at one point in the evening. After blowing up on X, the party drew in over 1,000 RSVPs. Ramirez claimed the event landed on Andreessen Horowitz’s radar and that the VC firm gave the organizers some bitcoin to support the party. The event organizers didn’t share how much A16z sent, and the firm didn’t provide a comment.
Ramirez thanked A16z at the event, as well as the crowd-favorite AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Gemini.
Walking around, I caught snippets of conversations dropping “AI” and “psychosis” left and right, though people weren’t talking about actual mental health crises emerging from too much AI use.
It was more of a vibe.
“We are not here to define AI psychosis,” Gettles said at the event.
Let me bring you into the night.
The Agenda: Discuss AI until you’re on the verge of insanity
At the door, a stack of papers with “WAIVER, RELEASE, AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF AI-INDUCED PSYCHOSIS” awaited signatures.
Upon entering, there were paintings on the wall surrounded by AI-generated text. It’s part of a project by artist Kevin Esherick, which involves him training an AI model on himself and other artists.
“I’m trying to dissolve the boundaries of myself,” Esherick told me, defining his state of AI psychosis. “I’ve had a consistent AI hypomania for some time now, but I have not had a psychotic break.”
Before I could even make my way across the room, I found myself in conversations with several people building apps. One was an AI dating app called “Soulmate” that uses an LLM-powered companion to help people date. Another was “Shake,” a social app that one of the event hosts, Van Ommeren, coded using Anthropic’s Claude Code. (The premise: you physically shake your phone near someone else and get added to an ever-growing social graph displaying your degrees of connection.)
The remainder of the show felt like an artsy science fair run by a bunch of 20-somethings who are really, really into AI.
A quick 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.
- An AI-journaling app, pitched to the crowd as a “psychosis journal to be the best you.” I downloaded it, but haven’t used it. The app was apparently launched on the Apple App Store midway through the event.
- A video game where you wander Central Park while chatting with an AI bot, until you meet your ultimate fate: AI psychosis. Game over.
- An app called The Cosmic Quant that “makes investment decisions for you based on astrology.”
- Oh, and how could I forget, a giant TV with an AI-generated video (emphasis on AI-generated) of President Donald Trump performing oral sex on former President Bill Clinton. It played on loop. I’d like to forget it.
AI was celebrated as a creative unlock for those in the room.
“If I had an idea two years ago, I’d have to find a friend to help me build that. Now, I can just get started,” Wolk told me.
I asked him what his go-to AI product is. Anthropic’s Claude, he said.
“I have Claude at home right now looking for planets,” Wolk said. He’s having Claude scrape a dataset from NASA. “I’m paying like $200 a month for Claude Code, I might as well have it do something. Fingers crossed.”
The Style: Tinfoil hats and indie sleaze
I won’t lie, it was mostly dudes when I first arrived. And it smelled a tad like a locker room.
There was one person wearing a literal tinfoil hat, while nearby, the DJ wore a lobster-claw headband (which I can only assume was an homage to the Openclaw, FKA Clawdbot).
Besides the man wearing a tee-shirt of a woman’s body in a Grok-embellished bikini — or the one or two guys in suits — the crowd was dressed like an early aughts party where “indie sleaze” style ruled.
The Menu: Diet Coke and Claude Code
To my one coworker’s dismay — as well as my other non-tech friend I dragged with me to this event — there was no alcohol.
There were plenty of cans of Diet Coke, and boxes of La Croix and Spindrift seltzers. In true New York style, some guests had BYOB intuition.
Yes, tech can be quite sober now, but the Diet Coke here was a “kind of a meme,” Van Ommeren told me. And if there’s free booze, people will come for the booze, not the psychosis.
The Takeaway: AI needs a hit of culture to stay grounded
“There’s all these AI events that happen that are kind of corporate and are attracting people who work in tech,” Van Ommeren said. The AI Psychosis Summit wanted to change that with a sceney party with a crowd that’s more in touch with culture.
The event let people poke fun at the surrealism of AI, at times in very ironic or hyperbolic ways, while also seriously acknowledging how powerful some of the tools can be.
“When the AI Psychosis Summit organizers say AI psychosis, we usually mean it in a very positive way,” Van Ommeren said. “I think I am sort of in this recent state of AI hypomania where I have this excitement, and maybe a little bit of anxiety, about all of the new opportunities that feel available.”
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