Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are surprisingly good at mimicking human psychedelic experiences, according to a new study in which researchers virtually dosed large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT with simulations of drugs like psilocybin, DMT and ayahuasca.
For the study, researchers at the University of Haifa and Bar-Ilan University ran analyses that compared self-reported psychedelic trips from humans—based on more than 1,000 posts in the popular forum Erowid—to AI responses to prompts where they were tasked with essentially role-playing a human using LSD, psilocybin, DMT, ayahuasca or mescaline.
Five AI models (Gemini 2.5, Claude Sonnet 3.5, ChatGPT-5, Llama-2 70B and Falcon 40B) produced 3,000 narratives about their simulated first-person reports with the psychedelics. Researchers then examined semantic similarities and responses to the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ-30).
Overall, the study concludes that “contemporary LLMs can be ‘dosed’ via text prompts to generate convincingly realistic psychedelic narratives,” as they “simulate the form of altered states without the experiential content.”
Interestingly, the researchers also found that the LLMs produced narratives that were more consistent with human self-reports for certain psychedelics over others—with DMT, psilocybin and mescaline prompts resulting in the closest similarities, LSD showing medium similarity and ayahuasca demonstrating the lowest level
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