Zhang exhaled. She had just lately stop her secure job as a product supervisor at a significant tech firm to begin her personal enterprise, and he or she now felt validated. For years, she turned to conventional Chinese language fortune tellers earlier than main life choices, looking for steerage and readability for as much as 500 RMB (about $70) per session. However now, she asks DeepSeek. (Zhang’s start particulars have been modified to guard her privateness.)
“I started to talk to DeepSeek as if it’s an oracle,” Zhang says, explaining that it may well assist her spirituality and in addition act as a handy different to psychotherapy, which continues to be stigmatized and largely inaccessible in China. “It has turn out to be my go-to once I really feel overwhelmed by ideas and feelings.”
Zhang isn’t alone. As DeepSeek has emerged as a homegrown challenger to OpenAI, younger folks throughout the nation have began utilizing AI to revive fortune-telling practices which have deep roots in Chinese language tradition. Over 2 million posts in February alone have talked about “DeepSeek fortune-telling” on WeChat, China’s greatest social platform, in keeping with WeChat Index, a device the corporate launched to observe its trending key phrases. Throughout Chinese language social media, customers are sharing AI-generated readings, experimenting with fortune-telling immediate engineering, and revisiting historic non secular texts—all with the assistance of DeepSeek.
An AI BaZi frenzy
The surge in DeepSeek fortune-telling comes throughout a time of pervasive nervousness and pessimism in Chinese language society. Following the covid pandemic, youth unemployment reached a peak of 21% in June 2023, and, regardless of some enchancment, it remained at 16% by the top of 2024. The GDP development price in 2024 was additionally among the many slowest in a long time. On social media, hundreds of thousands of younger Chinese language now consult with themselves because the “final technology,” expressing reluctance about committing to marriage and parenthood within the face of a deeply unsure future.
“At a time of financial stagnation and low employment price, [spirituality] practices create an phantasm of management and supply solace,” says Ting Guo, an assistant professor in spiritual research at Hong Kong Chinese language College.
However, Guo notes, “within the secular regime of China, folks can’t discover faith and spirituality in public. This has made extra non secular practices go underground in a extra non-public setting”—like, as an example, a pc or cellphone display screen.
Zhang first discovered about DeepSeek in January 2025, when information of R1’s launch flooded her WeChat feed. She tried it out of curiosity and was surprised. “Not like different AI fashions, it felt fluid, nearly humanlike,” she says. As a self-described spirituality fanatic, she quickly examined its potential to inform her fortune utilizing BaZi—and located the outcome remarkably insightful.
BaZi, or the 4 Pillars of Future, is a conventional Chinese language fortune-telling system that maps folks’s destiny on the premise of their start date and time. It analyzes the stability of wooden, hearth, earth, steel, and water in an individual’s chart to foretell profession success, relationships, and monetary fortune. Historically, readings required a talented grasp to interpret the complicated methods the weather work together. These consultants would provide a artistic and even poetic studying that’s troublesome to duplicate with a machine.
