I am increasingly embarrassed that I read my L.A. Times horoscope every morning, continuing to be a sucker for this scam.
So this morning, to advance my understanding of the machinations behind horoscopes (as well as to continue monitoring AI’s progress toward replacing human thought as the guiding mentality on this planet), I sought Gemini’s take on the subject.
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Conversation with Gemini (Google’s AI) on horoscopes
Me: Gemini, do you think an AI such as yourself could write credible seeming horoscopes derived, not from cosmic insights into hidden influences on human lives, but from rotations of formulaic language that have no relation to actual insights?
G: Not only could an AI do this, but it is uniquely suited for it. In fact, an AI generating horoscopes this way is simply automating a structural template that human astrology columns have relied on for decades.
At its core, LLM text generation is entirely built on the probabilistic rotation of formulaic language. Because large language models operate on statistical patterns of syntax rather than intentionality, belief, or actual cosmic perception, an AI writing a horoscope is mathematically incapable of doing anything other than rotating formulaic language without relation to actual insight.
Me: Do you think this idea has merit: Although creators of horoscopes rely on formulaic processes, there might be hidden cosmic forces that influence horoscopes while they continue to be random and bogus, so that a horoscope produced formulaically could still contain some truth from forces we can’t see?
G: If we entertain that perspective, the formulaic nature of the horoscope (whether written by a human astrologer or an LLM) ceases to be a flaw and instead becomes its virtue. In traditions of divination—from the I Ching and tarot cards to reading tea leaves—the physical tool or generating mechanism is deliberately arbitrary or structured. The coins thrown, the cards shuffled, or the tokens drawn are structurally random, but the system relies on the idea that the moment of consultation and the symbol encountered are linked by meaning rather than physical causation.
The hidden truth, then, isn’t pre-encoded in the text by the stars, nor is it manufactured by the machine. It is realized in the interaction: the precise moment a reader encounters a specific string of formulaic words, their mind bridges the gap, turning a statistical coincidence into a moment of genuine insight. The formula is just a mirror, but a well-constructed mirror can catch the light in unexpected ways, while remaining, as you’ve characterized it, bogus.
