my high priestess has soulless eyes
Why AI-generated tarot card decks aren't welcomed by the tarot community.
Last week as I was scrolling on Pinterest, my heart tugged at an image the algorithm had carefully placed on the altar of my explore page — The High Priestess.
For the uninitiated, The High Priestess is one of the 78 cards in a tarot deck and is my favourite card, a fact that the Pinterest algorithm weaponises to grab my eyeballs. This particular deck was beautiful in blue and white with gold detailing, everything I am a sucker for. But there was a problem — the high priestess’ eyes were lifeless.
Most modern-day tarot card decks are modelled on the Rider-Waite deck, created by British occultist and artist Pamela Colman Smith according to the directions of British poet and Freemason Arthur Edward Waite. First published in 1910, this deck has 78 cards divided into the major and minor arcana. The major arcana has 22 cards that symbolise the big picture of life, and the minor arcana with its 56 cards indicates the unique nuances of each person’s big picture. As the name suggests, The High Priestess is a major arcana card symbolising mysticism, spirituality, wisdom, occult, feminine intuition etc.
In the original Rider-Waite deck, the High Priestess is drawn in Marian imagery with a blue mantle, a cross representing her heart, and the crescent moon at her feet. The crown is widely believed to represent the Egyptian goddess Hathor who is described as compassionate and nurturing. Later tarot decks based on the Rider-Waite deck represented the High Priestess as Persephone, Artemis, Hecate, Freya, Shakti, the Oracle of Delphi, and other pagan goddesses associated with magic, fertility, and motherhood.
Regardless of the inspiration behind the imagery the one thing the High Priestess cards have in common is a welcoming face and kind eyes. Any time this card falls out in my readings, I instantly feel calm and loved. Now you know why I was thrown off when I saw the High Priestess card Pinterest shamelessly pimped out to me. Her face was blank. Her eyes were lifeless. She was just...there.
The Etsy page selling this deck looked genuine. The creator had two other decks listed and a dozen sales to their credit. The High Priestesses in these other decks were also soulless.
Initially, I thought these decks’ creator was trying to convey something with these blank-faced High Priestesses. Maybe something about the current state of money-hungry fear-mongering rhetorics of modern spiritual gurus who call themselves high priestesses? Unfortunately, not.
As I flipped through the deck, the King of Cups answered my questions — he had three hands!!!
Yes, you guessed it right. The deck that tugged at my heart and seemingly looked like my dream deck was not created by the loving hands of an artist. It was AI-generated by a model that was probably trained on stolen art to a prompt that apparently didn’t make it clear that human beings only have two arms.
Now I am not the most vocal AI basher. It has many use cases that can ultimately improve the quality of human life, especially in medicine and engineering. My views are pretty much in line with this author’s:
More importantly, using a resource-intensive technology to write a simple email, search the web, or create art for profit is careless, unethical, and selfish. While this is a larger conversation to be had some other day, this week’s girl online specifically focuses on why the tarot community doesn’t accept AI-generated tarot card decks. Most of these arguments can be made for any creative process that AI claims to “automate” and “democratise.”
As a professional tarot reader — I do like one paid reading a month, but still— I own a few decks and the most rewarding part of working with a new deck is learning about the deck itself.
Even though most decks are modelled on the Rider-Waite deck, the similarities usually end at the structure and the general meaning — the 22 major arcana and 56 minor arcana have a set meaning that stays largely consistent. The changes in imagery and symbolism the creator brings in are usually detailed in an accompanying guidebook. Most of them are also themed and I know some readers who even use specific decks for different categories of readings (love, life, career, self-growth etc.). “Coming up with 78 cards, each with multilayered meaning, all coherently working together to tell a story, is really difficult. There’s a reason a deck can take the author a decade or more to create,” says Claire, a tarot reader based in Seattle, USA.
In today’s world, creation and consumption are fast processes. But art is not meant to be created or consumed rushed. While a decade might seem way too long to make your dream deck a reality, the consumption of it is also relatively slow. For instance, it takes me nearly a year to read a new deck without referring to its guidebook. Even with decks I have been using for years, I still discover new symbolism every time I work with them. Most readers don’t throw away the decks they aren’t using anymore but donate them to other readers in their community who then start learning the decks again.
“The tarot isn’t a mass-produced device for fortune telling, it is a magical tool which aids personal growth and transformation, and as such, the more detailed and nuanced the card is, the more magical it becomes. The magic is in the detail. The magic is in the nuance. Artists consider every detail, from the angle of each shape to the hue of their background, every nuance is observed,” says Inbaal Honigman, a psychic and reader based in London, UK. “However, attempting to create a card by AI is akin to creating a crystal from plastic. If the spirit is not there, then the deck simply won't work. People have a soul, crystals have a spark, and tarot decks have a certain magickal quality in them which cannot be replicated by AI.”
Even if you argue that to AI-generate a tarot deck you still need to feed prompts to the AI model and therefore, it still embodies intention and spirit, I would like to remind you that the spirit that deck would embody wouldn’t be yours but that of big tech which has been proven to be racist and sexist.
Another pro-AI-generated tarot deck argument I would like to consider is that AI helps aspiring creators who aren’t artistic to realise their visions. This is a pointless argument. Some of the most popular decks, including the Rider-Waite deck were collaborations between an author and an illustrator. If you are not artistically gifted, you can always work with an illustrator to bring your vision to life. “I think these days, a lot of people just want a piece of consumer pie in the tarot scene. For those people, AI is a godsend, because it removes some of the tedium of trying to come up with good illustrations across an entire 78-card deck. They can churn out what amount to RWS reskins with relative ease,” adds Claire.
“I bought a deck from a thrift store because it was pretty to look at. I didn’t know that it was generated using AI. At the end of the day, it was just themed illustrations that were easy on the eyes,” a tarot reader who wished to remain anonymous tells me. “It is getting increasingly difficult to figure out which ones are AI-generated and which ones aren’t.”
This tarot reader is not alone in this AI-generated predicament. If you search digital tarot communities like r/tarotdecks and r/tarot for the term “AI”, you will find numerous rants from users who unknowingly bought AI-generated decks and quickly realised that they were useless as divination tools. As I confessed above, I almost fell in love with the tarot deck Pinterest pushed to my feed. If I wasn’t precarious about AI-generated creatives (and as a technology reporter and writer, I very much am), I would have bought that deck.
If you have also faced this problem, my suggestion is to look for the author of the deck. Most tarot card creators, especially the ones behind the pretty ones that catch your eyes have an online footprint. Checking the artist’s social media profiles can, to an extent, help you verify the authenticity of a deck. If you can’t find a credible online footprint, then take a closer look at the imagery and symbolism. Most AI-generated decks aren’t consistent with their imagery. If you find a deck with inconsistent themes and symbolism, then that is probably AI-generated and useless.
I picked up tarot a few years ago and picked my first deck bc I recognized the artist (Tillie Walden). When I pull cards I’m reminded of how I felt reading her graphic novels. That would not happen with an AI deck!