Zhang exhaled. She had just lately give up her secure job as a product supervisor at a serious tech firm to start out 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, in search of 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 likewise act as a handy different to psychotherapy, which remains to be stigmatized and largely inaccessible in China. “It has develop into my go-to once I really feel overwhelmed by ideas and feelings.”
Zhang will not be 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 line with WeChat Index, a instrument 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 historical 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 anxiousness 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 tip of 2024. The GDP development price in 2024 was additionally among the many slowest in a long time. On social media, tens of millions of younger Chinese language now seek advice from 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 not discover faith and spirituality in public. This has made extra non secular practices go underground in a extra non-public setting”—like, for 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, virtually humanlike,” she says. As a self-described spirituality fanatic, she quickly examined its potential to inform her fortune utilizing BaZi—and located the end result 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, fireplace, 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 tough to copy with a machine.
