A reflection on AI astrology, the seduction of the algorithm, and what we lose when we outsource self-knowledge

A client came to see me recently, a woman who has been working with me for some years. During the session she mentioned that her daughter asked why she was spending money on a consultation when she could simply put the question through an AI system. She showed me what her daughter’s AI had produced. The planetary placements were wrong. Not incrementally wrong. Utterly wrong. And don’t get me started on the interpretation!!

Sadly, this is not an isolated incident. It is becoming a pattern, and the irony of that word is not lost.

The Pattern is hugely popular amongst many spiritual seekers and is one of the better quality apps available, yet its founder Lisa Donovan is not an astrologer. A co-founder of Maker Studios, and a YouTube entrepreneur she came to astrology during a difficult period in her mid-thirties, worked with a practitioner during that time. Hugely impressed with its accuracy she built an app that she tested on friends and strangers before launching. It has attracted millions of users, serious press coverage, and a devoted following among younger people who find in its language something that speaks to them. And its language is genuinely seductive. It carries the warmth of psychological spirituality, the register of someone who has sat with their own chart and found it illuminating, and it sounds, to anyone who has not spent years learning what accurate and meaningful astrological interpretation actually requires, entirely convincing.

Feeling accurate and being accurate are two different things. A transit that the app described as lasting nine months, in the chart of someone close to me, was not present by any honest calculation, even with generous orbs. It had passed weeks earlier. It was not returning within the year as the app suggested. The synastry aspects described between her and her partner did not exist as stated – they had Venus Square Pluto, though the app suggested it was Venus opposite Pluto. Moreover, the way in which her now former partner used AI to filter his communiqué, to process his thoughts and perhaps even seek council opens up an entirely different discussion on the AI-Heart/ therapy/ growth and evolution issue. My friend is not an astrologer and didn’t reach out to me because she was respecting my busyness and had come to believe that the app was accurate, since so much of the language used was appealing and made sense. After all she was engaging a quintessential human experience – we are extraordinarily good at finding what we are looking for when we are hungry enough to be seen.

And people are hungry. That is the truth sitting underneath all of this, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed. The cost and the lead in time to work with a professional astrologer, or a therapist, or any practitioner who works with genuine depth, is a factor in that frustrates many in a world expecting immediacy. If the wait is long, move on and find someone who is immediately available. Sadly many experienced practitioners are not immediately available, after all there are only so many hours in any given day! Yet the vulnerability required is real. An app that opens on a phone at midnight, asks for a birth date, and returns something warm and considered and seemingly personal answers a need that is not going away. That need is legitimate. The question is what is being offered in response to it, and what that response is quietly doing.

Because the ‘readings’ are being used to make decisions about relationships, about whether to stay or leave, about whether a person is compatible or impossible, about whether the timing is right or wrong. A whole generation is developing its understanding of astrology through systems that may be calculating incorrectly and interpreting partially, drawing on digital material that clusters around the most popular sources, the most visited websites, the most accessible sun-sign columnists, those who have touched the surface of the discipline rather than lived inside it. And when those readings confirm what someone already half believes, when the synastry report describes the relationship as challenging and the person was already looking for permission to leave, the app has not offered insight. It has offered an exit dressed in the language of cosmic authority.

This is where the concern becomes something more than technical. Intimacy is difficult. It has always been difficult, and that difficulty is not a sign that something has gone wrong. To be genuinely close to another person is to meet, sooner or later, the parts of oneself that remain unresolved, and that meeting is uncomfortable in direct proportion to how much growing it is asking for. What is becoming increasingly visible, in the consulting room and outside it, is the speed with which people are now reaching for a reason to leave that encounter rather than move through it. Triggered is the word that is a buzz word. He triggered me. She triggered me. The astrology says we are incompatible. The app says this transit is too much right now. And underneath all of it, very often, is someone who is not prepared to look at their own patterns, their own scripts, the ways in which they are drawing a particular kind of person into their life and then finding reasons why that person is the problem.

Mental health awareness has grown in ways that are genuinely valuable, and the understanding that early experience shapes adult relating is knowledge worth having. And that same vocabulary has become, in certain hands, a means of avoiding precisely the growth that relationships are asking for. When the friction of two people becoming genuinely known to one another gets named as a red flag, when the invitation to examine oneself gets reframed as evidence of the other person’s toxicity, when an AI reading arrives as confirmation that the stars simply do not support this, something is being abdicated. The self-responsibility that genuine self-knowledge requires, the willingness to sit with what one is bringing rather than cataloguing only what the other person is failing to provide, is what is being set aside. And the apps are making that easier to do, and dressing it in language that makes it feel like wisdom.

There is a longer question sitting behind all of this, and it is one worth mentioning. The divinatory arts have been systematically undermined for centuries, and the mechanisms of that undermining have had very little to do with any honest examination of what those arts actually offer. Astrology, practised with genuine skill, returns power to the individual. It cultivates self-knowledge, self-responsibility, awareness of one’s own cycles and patterns, the capacity to navigate a life consciously rather than reactively. That is a genuinely radical offering, and it has historically made certain interests uneasy. A population fluent in its own patterns, awake to its own agency, is not a population that is easily managed or easily sold to. The question of who benefits from a debased version of that knowledge, distributed at enormous scale in a form that confirms existing patterns rather than challenging them, feels like a question worth sitting with honestly.

Because that is what the apps do, at their most problematic. They do not challenge. They do not redirect. They do not sense the moment when what is being asked is not actually the question, or stay with someone through the discomfort of recognising themselves in something they would rather not see. Those capacities are not peripheral to astrological counsel. They are the work itself, and they live in the practitioner’s body as much as in their knowledge, accumulated across decades of sitting with people in that particular quality of silence just before the real conversation begins.

There is no quick fix in this work. There never has been. Compatibility is a far more complex matter than any application can assess, because compatibility is not a fixed quality between two people. It is a question of what each person is prepared to grow into, what they are willing to examine in themselves, and whether the relationship between them is one that asks for that growth and offers the conditions for it. Two charts can describe a challenging dynamic and a profoundly transformative one in the same breath. What determines the experience is not the astrology alone. It is the awareness and willingness of the people living inside it.

That is not something an algorithm can hold. It is not something that can be returned in a notification. It unfolds in time, in the presence of genuine attention, in the kind of conversation that requires both people in the room to be honest. Astrology, in the right hands, has always been one of the most remarkable tools available for that conversation. The concern is that an entire generation may be forming its relationship with the discipline through systems that misrepresent it, and finding in that misrepresentation not illumination but permission, permission to stay comfortable, to confirm what they already believe, and to call that self-knowledge and more sinisterly, will discover that astrology is ‘inaccurate’ and therefore cast it aside, again. It is not and has never been inaccurate. There is a reason why it has persisted for millennia, but it is practised by those who don’t understand it and are using the wrong mathematical models to define its operation. Just as there are those who call themselves astrologers and are not, apps that interpret astrology based on a level of astrology that is poor quality and misunderstood by the programmer and at time by the astrologer.

I hope if you are going to use AI for astrology, you don’t! Go learn it for yourself. Go work with an astrologer. There are many very talented astrologers out there. But more importantly, the planets do not cause things to ‘happen’ just as life is not linear and concretely predictable. Life is messy. Why, because we are multifaceted complex non-linear beings. You cannot apply a linear system to a chaotic one and expect it to reflect true reality.