Zhang exhaled. She had lately give up her steady 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 selections, in search of steering and readability for as much as 500 RMB (about $70) per session. However now, she asks DeepSeek. (Zhang’s beginning 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 will probably assist her spirituality and in addition act as a handy various to psychotherapy, which remains to be stigmatized and largely inaccessible in China. “It has grow to be my go-to after I really feel overwhelmed by ideas and feelings.”
Zhang just 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 largest social platform, based on WeChat Index, a software 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 religious 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 fee 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 fee, [spirituality] practices create an phantasm of management and supply solace,” says Ting Guo, an assistant professor in non secular 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 religious practices go underground in a extra personal setting”—like, as an illustration, a pc or telephone display screen.
Zhang first realized about DeepSeek in January 2025, when information of R1’s launch flooded her WeChat feed. She tried it out of curiosity and was surprised. “In contrast to different AI fashions, it felt fluid, virtually humanlike,” she says. As a self-described spirituality fanatic, she quickly examined its skill 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 beginning 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 tough to duplicate with a machine.
