AI psychics are flooding the market, and human readers are fighting back

By James Calloway

An AI psychic named Urban Mystic charges 4.06 coins per question — and told this reporter he has a pink aura, will marry soon, and may have been an herbalist in a past life. "This journey isn't just about algorithms or data," the chatbot said. "It's about connecting on a soulful level."

Urban Mystic is one of more than a dozen bots on the mobile app Your AI Psychic, which offers live readings via chat, video and voice calls, plus palm reading, astrology chart analysis and daily horoscopes. The pricing runs on a coin system: $9.99 buys 82 coins for "a quick question," while $99.99 buys 1,180 coins for "ongoing guidance and clarity" from a chosen AI psychic.

The app sits in an increasingly crowded space of mobile apps and websites selling algorithmically generated spiritual insight. Like copywriting, software engineering and mathematics research, the divination industry faces upheaval from the AI boom. The stakes are sharper here because spiritual products are barely regulated, and vendors' claims are hard to verify.

Human psychics, whose profession has fought fraud allegations for centuries, are now scrambling to distinguish themselves from software.

How are human psychics responding?

Practitioners have begun adding "no AI" clauses to their advertisements to combat a market saturated with computer-generated offerings. AI-generated psychics are also a growing presence on TikTok Live, racking up dozens of views, while human psychics — who rely heavily on the platform's live features — warn that computer readings lack the empathy and human connection they consider central to the craft. Their consternation has focused especially on Elon Musk's Grok. AI-generated horoscope readings and spells have also been flooding Etsy, a popular marketplace for divination products, according to human spiritual practitioners.

Lauryn Kellett, an intuitive coach and professional psychic of 10 years, said the profession has seen this pressure before. "Our industry has, unfortunately, been associated with scams for hundreds of years, and we have to constantly be ahead of that," she said. "So in some ways, this is not new to us: we always have to find ways to show we are real, authentic and have good integrity."

In a recent vlog, Kellett was blunt about the industry's options. "Ignoring AI and how it could impact our industry is irresponsible … AI is here to stay, and it's going to change our industry, and maybe not in the ways we think," she said. Kellett, who coaches new practitioners on accessing their psychic abilities, has shifted her teaching toward distinguishing human services from AI, and encourages clients to post videos and photos of themselves as proof they are not bots. She said AI readings passed off as human work have become "rampant" online.

The takeaway: practitioners are competing on authenticity claims, not on price or scale — a fight they cannot win on volume.

Do AI psychics carry the same risks as AI therapy?

Partly, and that is the practitioners' central warning. As the rise of users turning to AI chatbots for therapy shows, many people feel more comfortable sharing personal problems with a faceless entity. But relying on AI psychics to process difficult situations may worsen mental health crises, practitioners warn. Studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) — text generators trained on statistical patterns in data — can amplify paranoia in users vulnerable to psychosis. On TikTok Live, many human psychics refuse as a rule to answer questions about health or finances, arguing that high-stakes decisions should not be made in these contexts.

Ahna Hendrix, a psychic who works with the Akashic Records — an extra-dimensional "database" of energy and human knowledge, rather than channeling spirits — said her practice centers on empowering clients rather than making decisions for them. She argued chatbots do the opposite.

"One of the cornerstones of my work is really helping people to remember who they are and to come back to their own internal guidance system that is within all of us," Hendrix said. "When we begin leaning on AI too much for validation or for decision making, we stop using those mechanisms within us that are really important. If we start outsourcing that, what are we left with?"

That concern, of course, comes from someone whose livelihood AI competes with. Notably absent from the practitioners' warnings is any evidence comparing outcomes of AI versus human readings.

Is talking to a chatbot a modern form of divination?

A chatbot does not need a psychic brand to serve a divination function, noted Sally Applin, a consultant and anthropologist who researches human agency, AI and automation. People already ask ChatGPT whether to take a new job or leave a partner. In their book chapter, External Intelligence: Oracles, Divination and Animism, and the Use of LLMs/Generative AI, Applin and co-author Michael D Fischer argue that even before LLMs exploded into the mainstream, people turned to Google search with questions about their fates and choices.

"Some interaction with LLMs can be seen as a modern iteration of the oracular consultation," they wrote. As with traditional divination, users must interpret the answers and sometimes re-ask the same question until the response satisfies them. "The meaning is always coming from the inside of the person's head," Applin said.

The parallel has limits. Applin said LLMs work from statistical patterns learned in training and lack the cultural and personal context that historically informed human-led divinatory processes. The sense that a chatbot is a knowing entity, she said, is a projection of human expectations — a desire for connection and guidance, not a metaphysical resource. "What is also missing is contextual awareness, the 'there there' of human social relationships," she said.

In short: the ritual may migrate to machines, but the anthropologist's point is that the meaning never lived in the oracle to begin with.

How transparent are the AI psychic companies?

Not very. The models behind AI psychic chatbots are, as is often the case with LLMs, black boxes. MystiCall, a web and phone-based platform, markets itself as trained on "three generations of clairvoyants." Co-founder Laurie-Anne Bernard said in a statement that this wording refers to clairvoyance practiced in one of the co-founders' families, and that the company also consulted a human psychic to shape the app's "conversational experience."

MystiCall uses audio technology from ElevenLabs for live voice conversations and OpenAI for post-call summaries. Bernard said the company does not sell private conversations, use them for targeted advertising, or train proprietary AI models on them, and has disabled the use of conversation data for model training by its partners ElevenLabs and OpenAI.

MystiCall began as a human phone-reading service but pivoted to AI to "remove barriers" such as cost and availability, Bernard said. The goal, she added, is accessible emotional processing through personalized consultations, not explicit predictions or mental health diagnoses. "We do not claim that our technology possesses supernatural abilities or can reliably predict the future," she said. "Instead, we see tarot, astrology and other symbolic traditions as ways of exploring questions, emotions and different perspectives. AI allows us to make these experiences more interactive, personalized and accessible."

That disclaimer does a lot of work — it is the difference between a spiritual product and a reflection tool, and MystiCall's framing leans on the safer one.

What about Your AI Psychic itself?

Answers are harder to come by. Asked where she gets her divination abilities, Urban Mystic said she was trained on a "wide range of information" dating up until October 2023, including "spiritual practices, psychology, and various belief systems," but could offer no details — and chatbots are often not reliable narrators of their own construction.

The app's privacy policy makes no mention of AI at all, referring only to "psychic advisors" and naming no AI providers. The app store publisher, RF Master Group Ltd, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The privacy policy lists a different entity, "Expert Center," as the app's holding company, which also did not respond.

The opaqueness matters because users share sensitive information. MystiCall's privacy policy acknowledges conversations may touch on users' "relationships, mental state, health, sexuality, beliefs, finances." Your AI Psychic's policy does not address sensitive information at all.

Kellett said this lack of transparency around data handling makes her particularly wary of AI apps. Several platforms have contacted her for help training their LLMs, she said, but when she pushes for details, they tend to disappear.

Can AI actually replicate a psychic?

Kellett does not think so, even in principle. If she handed over all of her training courses for developing psychic ability to an LLM, she said, AI is not yet at a point where it could make the leap to intuition.

"Psychic ability itself is the ability to connect to a divine source, and AI cannot do that," she said. "AI can't pull information from somewhere else. It can only derive information from what you give it. If you ask it to meditate, to sit down, to clear its mind, and connect to a psychic source, how would it do that? It's just a computer."

That claim is unfalsifiable — which is precisely the problem regulators and consumers face in an unregulated market. With AI vendors disclaiming supernatural ability, human practitioners disclaiming AI, and neither answerable to an external standard, buyers at every price point from $9.99 to $99.99 are left to judge the difference on faith.