Alright, let me walk you through this little project I tinkered with – building an AI tarot reader. It started pretty simply, just me messing around, you know? I’ve always been a bit curious about tarot, not in a super serious way, but the symbolism is interesting. And I’ve been playing with AI stuff lately, so I thought, why not try smashing them together?
Getting the Ball Rolling
First thing, I needed the basics. What does each tarot card mean? There are 78 of them, right? Major Arcana, Minor Arcana, suits, reversals… it’s quite a bit. I didn’t have a deck handy that came with a good book, so I went online. Spent a good chunk of time just gathering descriptions, keywords, and interpretations for each card. Had to copy-paste a lot, clean it up, put it into a format the computer could maybe understand later. It was more grunt work than I expected, honestly.
Then, the AI part. I wasn’t about to build a whole AI from scratch, no way. I looked around for some AI models that are good at understanding and generating text. Found a few options, decided to go with one that seemed reasonably accessible, something I could feed information to and get text back from. Didn’t need anything too fancy at the start.
Putting the Pieces Together
Okay, so I had the card meanings sorta organized. I needed a way to ‘draw’ cards. That was easy enough, just basic programming stuff – make the computer pick one or a few numbers from 1 to 78 randomly. I decided to start with a simple three-card spread: Past, Present, Future. Classic, right?
The tricky part was getting the AI to act like a tarot reader. I couldn’t just throw the card names and meanings at it and hope for the best. I had to give it instructions, like a prompt. Something like: “You are a tarot reader. The user drew these three cards: [Card 1] for the Past, [Card 2] for the Present, and [Card 3] for the Future. Based on their traditional meanings, give a short reading.”
Getting that prompt right took a lot of tries. Seriously, a lot of tweaking.
- Sometimes the AI just listed the meanings I gave it. Boring.
- Sometimes it went off on weird tangents that had nothing to do with tarot.
- Sometimes the tone was totally wrong, like a robot explaining a technical manual.
I played with the wording, added more context about the feeling of a tarot reading, told it to be a bit more insightful or mystical, but not too over the top. I also fed it the structured meanings I had gathered earlier, hoping it would blend them together.
Hitting Snags and Fixing Things
One issue was consistency. The same cards might get a totally different vibe depending on the AI’s mood, I guess. And making it understand reversed cards added another layer of headache. I had to specifically add reversed meanings and tell the prompt to consider if a card was upright or reversed.
I also realized just giving meanings wasn’t enough. Real tarot readings often connect the cards. So, I updated the prompt again, asking the AI to try and find connections or a narrative flow between the Past, Present, and Future cards. That helped make the readings feel a bit more joined-up.
It was never perfect, mind you. It’s still an AI. It doesn’t know anything, it’s just pattern matching based on the tons of text it learned from. There’s no real intuition there, which is kinda the heart of actual tarot reading, I suppose.
Where It Ended Up
So, after all that fiddling, I ended up with a little program. You run it, it ‘draws’ three cards, sends the info and my carefully crafted prompt to the AI, and spits back a paragraph or two of interpretation. It’s… interesting. Sometimes the readings are surprisingly fitting, other times they are generic or slightly off.
It’s a fun toy, a neat demonstration of what you can hook together. But would I rely on it for deep life advice? Nah. It lacks that human element, the intuition, the conversation you’d have with a person reading cards for you. But as a project, figuring out how to get the AI to perform this specific task? It was a pretty cool process to go through. Learned a lot, mostly about how tricky it is to get AI to capture nuance and specific tones.
