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How DeepSeek became a fortune teller for China’s youth
AI-powered BaZi analysis has become the new oracle for a disillusioned generation seeking answers.
MIT Technology Review
By Caiwei Chen
March 3, 2025 | 1221 words | ★★
★
☆☆
In the glow of her laptop screen, 31-year-old Zhang Rui typed carefully, following a prompt she’d found on Chinese social media: “You are a BaZi master. Analyze my fate—describe my physical traits, key life events, and financial fortune. I am a female, born June 17, 1993, at 4:42 a.m. in Hangzhou.”
DeepSeek R1, China’s most advanced AI reasoning model, took just 15 seconds to respond. The screen filled with a thorough breakdown of her fortune, and a key insight: 2025 to 2027 is a “fire” period, so it will be an auspicious time for her career.
Zhang exhaled. She had recently quit her stable job as a product manager at a major tech company to start her own business, and she now felt validated. For years, she turned to traditional Chinese fortune tellers before major life decisions, seeking guidance and clarity for up to 500 RMB (about $70) per session. But now, she asks DeepSeek. (Zhang’s birth details have been changed to protect her privacy.)
“I began to speak to DeepSeek as if it’s an oracle,” Zhang says, explaining that it can support her spirituality and also act as a convenient alternative to psychotherapy, which is still stigmatized and largely inaccessible in China. “It has become my go-to when I feel overwhelmed by thoughts and emotions.”
Zhang is not alone. As DeepSeek has emerged as a homegrown challenger to OpenAI, young people across the country have started using AI to revive fortune-telling practices that have deep roots in Chinese culture. Over 2 million posts in February alone have mentioned “DeepSeek fortune-telling” on WeChat, China’s biggest social platform, according to WeChat Index, a tool the company released to monitor its trending keywords. Across Chinese social media, users are sharing AI-generated readings, experimenting with fortune-telling prompt engineering, and revisiting ancient spiritual texts—all with the help of DeepSeek.
An AI BaZi frenzy
The surge in DeepSeek fortune-telling comes during a time of pervasive anxiety and pessimism in society. Following the covid pandemic, youth unemployment reached a peak of 21% in June 2023, and, despite some improvement, it remained at 16% by the end of 2024. The GDP growth rate in 2024 was also among the slowest in decades. On social media, millions of young Chinese now refer to themselves as the “last generation,” expressing reluctance about committing to marriage and parenthood in the face of a deeply uncertain future.
“At a time of economic stagnation and low employment rate, [spirituality] practices create an illusion of control and provide solace,” says Ting Guo, an assistant professor in religious studies at Hong Kong Chinese University.
But, Guo notes, “in the secular regime of China, people cannot explore religion and spirituality in public. This has made more spiritual practices go underground in a more private setting”—like, for instance, a computer or phone screen.
Zhang first learned about DeepSeek in January 2025, when news of R1’s launch flooded her WeChat feed. She tried it out of curiosity and was stunned. “Unlike other AI models, it felt fluid, almost humanlike,” she says. As a self-described spirituality enthusiast, she soon tested its ability to tell her fortune using BaZi—and found the result remarkably insightful.
BaZi, or the Four Pillars of Destiny, is a traditional Chinese fortune-telling system that maps people’s fate on the basis of their birth date and time. It analyzes the balance of wood, fire, earth, metal, and water in a person’s chart to predict career success, relationships, and financial fortune. Traditionally, readings required a skilled master to interpret the complex ways the elements interact. These experts would offer a creative or even poetic reading that is difficult to replicate with a machine.
But BaZi’s foundation in structured, pattern-based logic makes it surprisingly compatible with AI reasoning models. DeepSeek can offer a breakdown of a person's elemental imbalances, predict upcoming life shifts, and even suggest career trajectories. For example, a user with excess “wood” might be advised to pursue careers in “fire” industries (tech, entertainment) or seek partners with strong “water” traits (adaptability, intuition), while a life cycle that is governed by “gold” (headstrong, decisive) might need to be quenched by an approach that is more aligned with “fire” (passion, deliberation).
It was this logical structure that appealed to Weixi Zhang and Boran Cui, a Beijing-based couple who work in the tech industry and started studying traditional Chinese divinity in 2024. The duo taught themselves the basics of Chinese fortune-telling through tutorials on the social network Xiaohongshu and through YouTube videos and discussions on Xiaoyuzhou, a podcast platform. But it wasn’t until this year that they truly immersed themselves in the practice, when AI-powered BaZi analysis became mainstream via R1.
“Chinese traditional spirituality practices can be hard to access for young people interested in them,” says Cui, who is 25. “AI offers a great interactive entry point.” Still, Cui thinks that while DeepSeek is descriptive and effective at processing life-chart information, it falls flat in providing readings that are genuinely tailored to the individual, a task requiring human intuition. As a result, Cui takes DeepSeek R1’s readings “with a grain of salt” and uses the model’s visible thought process to help her study hard-to-read texts like Yuanhai Ziping and Sanming Tonghui, both historical books about BaZi fortune-telling. “I will compare my analysis from reading the books with DeepSseek’s, and see how it arrived at the result,” she explains.
Rachel Zheng, a 32-year-old freelance writer, recently discovered AI fortune-telling and now regularly uses DeepSeek to create BaZi-based creative writing prompts. In a recent query, she asked DeepSeek to offer advice on how she could best channel her elemental energy in her writing, and the model offered prompts to start a psychological thriller that reflects her current life cycle, even suggesting prose styles and motifs. Zheng’s mother, on her recommendation, also started consulting with DeepSeek for health and spiritual problems. “Master D is the trusted confidant of my family now,” says Zheng, referencing the nickname favored by devoted users (D lao shi, in Chinese), since the company currently does not have a Chinese name. “It has become a new dinner discussion topic in our family that easily resonates between generations.”
Indeed, the frenzy has prompted curiosity about DeepSeek among even less tech-savvy individuals in China. Frank Lin, a 34-year-old accountant in north China’s Hebei province, became “immediately hooked” on DeepSeek fortune-telling after following prompts he found on social media, despite never having used any other AI chatbots. “Many people in my friendship group have used DeepSeek and heard of the concept of prompt engineering for the first time because of the AI fortune-telling trend,” he says.
Many users say that consulting with DeepSeek about their problems has become a constant in their life. Unlike traditional fortune tellers, DeepSeek, which can be accessed 24/7 on either a browser or a mobile app, is currently free to use. Users also say they’ve found DeepSeek to be far better than ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot, at handling BaZi readings. “ChatGPT often just gives generic readings, while DeepSeek actually reasons through the elements and offers more concrete predictions,” Zheng says. ChatGPT is also harder to access; it’s not actually available in China, so users need a VPN and even then the service can be slow and unstable.
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