How young Chinese are turning to AI to tell their fortune amid fear of the future
Yang says that by combining the ancient Chinese concept of
ba zi – how a person's birth year, month, day and hour can influence their fate – with astrology apps and AI-powered chatbots such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek, she is able to glimpse into the future.
This extends to looking into her own future: she recently asked
ChatGPT to check on her compatibility with her boyfriend based on their ba zi.
'I input our birth dates, gender and birthplaces into an astrology app, got our ba zi, then imported the results to ChatGPT with the prompt: 'Assume you are a
feng shui master; please use our ba zi to assess our relationship,'' Yang says.
A screenshot from DeepSeek illustrates how the Chinese generative AI platform responds to prompts about fortune-telling. Photo: Nancy Wang's DeepSeek chatbot
Traditional Chinese philosophy uses five elements – wood, fire, earth, metal and water – to describe the relationship between things in the universe.
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