Inside the AI Psychosis Summit: Where Creators, Jokes, and AI Collide in NYC

The AI Psychosis Summit in New York City wasn’t your typical tech conference. No group therapy sessions. No zen gardens. Instead, attendees found a DJ spinning tracks, builders huddled around tables, and a cooler stocked with Diet Cokes. The event took place in the hollowed-out shell of a shuttered bank in Chinatown, where graffiti-stained windows framed projections of cascading lines of code.

Outside the entryway, organizers pasted AI psychosis memes connected by red string—a visual metaphor for the tangled, confusing relationship many feel with artificial intelligence. Inside, vibe coders and builders stood at tables, their computers and TVs displaying digital creations in a show-and-tell of AI passion projects.

The summit was organized by tech-optimists Macy Gettles, Wesam Jawich, Matt Van Ommeren, and Mauricio Trujillo Ramirez. Their goal? To showcase the weird, the frivolous, and the artistically driven side of AI—far removed from corporate tooling and productivity hacks.

What Is AI Psychosis?

AI psychosis, according to Matt Van Ommeren, “evades definition.” But he offered a working explanation: it’s a way to acknowledge the confusion surrounding AI and our relationship with it. “We can’t navigate it, and so we need some very general and jokey way to confront it,” he said. “So we just say AI psychosis just [to] dismiss reckoning with it.”

Mauricio Trujillo Ramirez took the theme further with an art installation inspired by a Yousuke Yukimatsu DJ set, blending sound and code into an immersive experience.

Why New York? The Intersection of Art and Tech

While San Francisco might seem like the obvious host for an AI event, Van Ommeren insisted on New York. “I think some of the impetus behind it is that we were going to AI events that felt really corporate, and people were just showing tooling, and they were talking about optimizing their work stuff,” he said. “Honestly, that’s not interesting to me. I wanted to find people who are artists or doing something crazy and weird or frivolous.”

Bizarre AI Projects Take Center Stage

The projects on display were anything but corporate. Joshua Wolk built a subway map that generates jazz music based on the routes of New York City trains—each line playing a different instrument. Tanisha Joshi created The Cosmic Quant, a website that blends astrology with investment advice, described by Joshi as “Co-Star meets Robinhood.”

One attendee, who lacked a booth, roamed the room with a tablet and phone, delivering guerrilla presentations of his bespoke metaverse. His creation, “MyAiGuys,” featured AI avatars with celebrity faces on Sim-like bodies—a deranged twist on Nintendo’s Mii Plaza, all designed for off-brand metaverse content creation.

Another creator, who goes by “yung algorithm,” presented an AI-powered prank calling system. He livestreams calls to “scammers” or “people selling stuff online,” exploiting the limitations of frontier AI models. “All the frontier AI models are really bad at feeling human,” he said. “They’re only good at booking stuff.”