AI is coming for your job. No career is safe. Entry-level jobs are disappearing, coders are thinking about burning their resumes and moving into a secluded shack in the woods, and now even tarot card readers are apparently staring down the barrel of ChatGPT. According to research, appropriately dug up by Study Finds, some tarot practitioners are now feeding their card pulls into ChatGPT and asking the machine for its interpretation.

Hm. This raises a lot of questions that I’ll get to in a bit, but first, the details of the study for some background.

The study, which you can find here, presented at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, says that since lots of people are into some kind of mystic prognostication, like astrology or tarot readings, once AI started getting big, it’s marketing making us all think it’s inevitable, unavoidable, a lot of people who were into fortune-telling stuff naturally started drifting to AI to satisfy their fortune-telling needs.

Researchers interviewed 12 tarot readers from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico who already use AI in their readings. Obviously, right off the bat, it’s a very small study, so make of that what you will. Some used ChatGPT because they doubted their own instincts. Others wanted multiple interpretations of the same randomized card pull. Some just liked how much faster it was.

That’s the gist of the study. It’s not really reaching any grand conclusions. The researchers just seemed curious as to how tarot people are using AI. But it does raise a lot of questions for me that I feel like the researchers should have dug into.

We’re Losing the Tarot Readers to the Machines

From what I understand tarot to be — and I’m far from an expert, as I’ve never had a reading and honestly don’t think any of this is real to begin with — isn’t there supposed to be some spiritually connected conduit involved? A human middleman interpreting meaning from the cards? That’s supposedly the whole job.

ChatGPT can absolutely generate tarot-sounding words because it scraped enough mystical word junk from the internet to fake it. But if tarot readers believe the cards require spiritual interpretation, then using ChatGPT seems to imply the AI also possesses whatever mystical connection is needed to access that meaning. Right? RIGHT?

So, by an experienced tarot person offloading their interpretations of the cards to ChatGPT, are they, through action, admitting that the word salad generator is also tapped into the great beyond? Can ChatGPT, if it were so inclined, open a stall in the back of a crystal shop so it can tell a young woman that The Seven of Swords means her boyfriend is definitely cheating on her with that wench Yolanda?

Does it also imply that Silicon Valley accidentally invented a robot psychic?

Since we know chatbots are just little digital sycophants, would it just be giving you flattering readings?

So many questions, and I’m far from the right person to answer them, and maybe not even knowledgeable enough to ask them. I am happy to hear that I’m not the only one who seems to have a problem with this. The researchers say that they’ve seen heavy resistance to AI from people in the online tarot community. Moderators in tarot discussion spaces have banned all talk about AI for, as Study Finds put it, “concerns that AI could erode their personal intuition over time.”

Which is basically what researchers looking into the effects of AI have been finding: the more you use it, the more you rely on it, the worse you become at doing things you should know how to do. An idea that we can now, apparently, also apply to the interpretive reading of a randomized card pull.