The LLM that pretends to tell the future

Inspired by this story in The Guardian last week:

In Thailand, where mysticism thrives, AI fortune telling finds fertile ground

A growing number of young Thais are turning to AI tools such as ChatGPT for answers about their future 

I jumped onto my phone app and asked it if it can do divination for me.   It's happy to do so, and offers a range of means - covering (from memory) tarot, i ching, runes or good old astrology.  (If you use the latter it asks for as much precision as possible for the time and place of birth.)

Now, I have no idea what it's really doing here - it claims to be able to pick random cards (say, for a 3 card tarot reading for a specific question) and then gives a meaning reading for each card.   But is the card meaning "standard" as far as these things go?   Being unfamiliar with Tarot cards, I wouldn't know if it is lying, or not.

But the oddest thing is that its creators have not tried to put up "guardrails" against users taking it seriously, at all!   Yet if you go to competitors such as Perplexity, Google's Gemini, or the Chinese Deepseek, they specifically say they can explain how divination systems are supposed to work, but they will not purport to do an actual reading as Chat GPT does.   

I asked Chat GPT to explain why it gives "readings" when other AI services refuse.  Here is how it answered:

 

Well, I am far from convinced that this is a good thing.

 

I see someone on Reddit says "is it just me, or does Chat GPT divination always just seem to tell you what you want to hear?"  I guess if it does, it's probably like what most human fortune tellers do, anyway!

 

But, I do recall a incident from my youth - maybe I have mentioned it before.  One or two of my aunts used to sometimes visit fortune tellers, but as I was not close to them, I don't really know the degree to which it was with belief, or just entertainment.   One of them, so I was told, was once given a bit of a dramatic warning of something terrible coming up (perhaps specifically about her then partner, or relationships generally?  I'm vague on the details now.)  As it happened, both her current partner, who she had left her husband for, and her ex husband, died on the day.   (One, perhaps both, of heart attacks.)  My mother claimed that the embittered ex-husband had warned the aunt she would not be happy for long with the new partner - come to think of it, I think he was the husband's friend!     So yeah, a bit spooky.

 

Yet the other famous family fortune telling misfortune was the warning that their mother (my grandmother) only had a specific period left to live - like another year or so?   So, they had some anxiety about that for a time - and then she went on to live for like another 15 years (or something like that - a very long time past her forecast demise.)

 

I tested Chat GPT by asking it to identify, via tarot, the year my father died, and gave it a decade long period to chose in.  It got the year wrong (was two years out). While that might not be divination exactly, it shows certain limitations if it can't get that right. 

 

There is a very large Lotto draw happening this week, though.  Unfortunately, I suppose, the guardrails mentioned above do prevent even Chat GPT from offering a set of winning numbers based on divination.   Probably wise - it's reputation for not being able to see the future would otherwise suffer!