So, the latest dispatch from the front lines of human folly comes from Thailand, of all places. A country steeped in mysticism, where they’ve been divining the future for centuries with gods and spirits and guys called “Mor Doo” – “doctors who see.” Sounds like they’ve seen a thing or two. But now, the kids are trading in the incense and the ancient rites for a new kind of magic man: ChatGPT. Yeah, you heard me. The same glorified autocomplete that’s probably writing term papers for half the college students on the planet is now moonlighting as a fortune teller.
This young woman, Whan, 28 years old, she’s all in. Used to be, seeing her regular flesh-and-blood seer meant booking months ahead, coughing up 600 baht for an hour of cosmic wisdom. Now? She just types her existential dread into a chat box. “I saw many people have asked you about their fortune based on a birth chart. Can you do it for me?” And the machine, ever so obliging, like a digital Jeeves, replies, “My pleasure,” then asks for her time, date, and location of birth. Probably cross-references it with her browser history and shopping habits for a real deep dive. She was so chuffed with the first reading she even uploaded a picture of her damn face for a face reading. Christ on a crutch. What’s next? Sending it a stool sample for a full diagnostic on your spiritual colon?
And the advice it shat out about her relationship? “One half of the couple tended to be sulky, while the other would over-analyse things.” Fucking brilliant. That’s not prophecy, sweetheart, that’s every goddamn relationship since Adam and Eve had their first tiff over who left the apple core lying around. You could get that kind of insight from a bartender after two beers, or from the graffiti in a public toilet. But coming from a disembodied AI, it’s suddenly profound. The human race, ladies and gentlemen.
They’re sharing tips on social media on how to upload palm pics, birth charts. It’s a whole new cottage industry of digital soothsaying. This content creator fella, Jirapat, “Nesh the Wizard” on TikTok, he’s riding the wave. Says his research showed “people just want to take their anxieties away as soon as possible.” No shit, Nesh. That’s the oldest story in the book. It’s why booze was invented. It’s why religion was invented. It’s why some of us stare at the ceiling at 3 a.m. wondering what the hell it’s all for. “If they have a question at night, at 1am, they don’t want to linger on that… They go to ChatGPT.” Right. Because wrestling with your own demons is too much like hard work. Better to outsource it to a server farm in Oregon.
He also says, “It’s easier for them [young people] to talk to robots rather than humans.” And there’s the gut punch, isn’t it? We’ve built a world so goddamn connected with our little pocket screens, yet we’re more alone than a lighthouse keeper on a stormy night. Easier to spill your guts to a disembodied string of code than to look another human in the eye and admit you’re scared, or lost, or just plain confused about which way is up. The machines don’t flinch. They don’t offer unsolicited advice based on their own miserable love lives. They don’t get bored and check their own phones while you’re mid-existential crisis. They just listen, process, and regurgitate. A perfect, sterile transaction. Is that what we’re after now? Connection as a service, hold the messy humanity?
This professor type, Ruchi Agarwal, chimes in that curiosity about the future spikes in times of instability. Political turmoil, economic nightmares, pandemics. Well, duh. When the ground’s shaking, people will grab onto anything that looks stable, even if it’s just a cleverly programmed illusion. “Young people have a feeling of [a lack] of control,” she says. Welcome to the fucking club, kids. The membership dues are steep, and they mostly involve hangovers and regret. They’re building “emotional resilience in an uncertain world.” That’s the jargon for it now. We used to call it having guts, or maybe just being too numb to care. Now it’s an app.
Of course, there are “concerns” about giving AI your personal info. Your photos, your birth details. Like feeding your deepest secrets to a digital black hole. But hey, they already know what brand of hemorrhoid cream you buy and how often you order pizza for one. What’s a little existential angst on top? It all goes into the great data maw, to be crunched and analyzed and probably used to sell you “AI-optimized spiritual comfort blankets” or some damn thing.
Then you’ve got the traditionalists, like Ajarn Par, Master Par, an astrologist in Bangkok. She’s skeptical. Says to give proper guidance, “you need to have lived experience… [human fortune tellers] have the feeling of human intuition.” Lived experience. That’s the rub. That means knowing what it’s like to have your heart broken so bad you can’t breathe. It means knowing the taste of desperation, the stink of failure, the glimmer of hope that keeps you putting one foot in front of the other even when you’re walking through hell. Can an algorithm, trained on terabytes of text and code, ever truly know that? It can mimic, sure. It can predict patterns. But can it understand the weight of a human soul? I doubt it.
She likens the fortune teller’s role to a therapist. “A robot cannot touch your feelings.” You got that right, sister. A robot can’t pour you a stiff drink and tell you you’re not alone, even if you feel like it. It can’t offer a crooked, knowing smile that says, “Yeah, life’s a bitch, but we’re still here, ain’t we?” That requires a pulse. A messy, flawed, gloriously imperfect human heart.
It makes you wonder what kind of “relationship advice” this thing is doling out. “Based on an analysis of 7.3 billion failed relationships, it is recommended you lower your expectations by 42.8%.” Or, “Statistically, flowers increase positive sentiment by 12% for 3.7 days. Consider purchasing flowers.” It’s the kind of advice that makes sense on paper, or on a screen, but misses the whole goddamn point of being human, which is mostly about not making sense, about doing stupid things for love, or hope, or just because it felt right in that one crazy moment.
Whan, our guinea pig, she sees good in both. The human you can see their face, their reactions. The AI, well, “you can just use it right away - and you can keep asking them.” Yeah, relentless. Like a cheap telemarketer for your soul. It’ll keep answering, keep processing, keep feeding you lines until you’re either satisfied or just too numb to care. Sounds like a fresh circle of hell Dante forgot to mention. Sometimes, the best answers come when you stop asking the damn questions and just listen to the silence for a change.
This whole charade, it’s just another symptom of the modern condition. We want everything sanitized, predictable, user-friendly. We want the wisdom without the wounds, the answers without the struggle. We’re trying to algorithmatize the human spirit, smooth out all the rough edges, turn the terrifying, beautiful chaos of existence into a neat little flowchart. Forget climbing the mountain; just download the view.
It’s a market, too, let’s not forget. The spiritual goods and services racket is already worth a fortune. Now the code-jockeys have found a new vein to tap: digital divination for the anxious masses. Easy answers, 24/7, satisfaction guaranteed (by a machine that doesn’t know what satisfaction is).
So, they’re queuing up for the chatbot oracle in Thailand. Tomorrow it’ll be somewhere else. The tech gets shinier, the promises get louder. But the fundamental human hunger for meaning, for a sign, for some goddamn reassurance that it’s not all a cosmic joke at our expense? That doesn’t change. We’re all just fumbling in the dark, looking for a light switch. Some find it in a church, some in a bottle, some in the arms of a lover. And now, some are finding it in the glow of a screen that says, “My pleasure.”
Good luck with that. You’ll need it. As for me, I’ll stick to my own methods of divination. They usually involve a bottle of something strong, a pack of smokes, and the kind of brutal honesty you only find staring at your own reflection at 4 a.m. The answers ain’t always pretty, but at least they’re earned.
It’s a thirsty world out there, and trying to figure it all out is enough to drive a man to drink. Or, apparently, to ChatGPT.
Pour me another. I’ve got some thinking to do.
Source: In Thailand, where mysticism thrives, AI fortune telling finds fertile ground