Here’s what I’ve found:
1. It’s a useful tool to locate facts quickly. If I want to know when Pluto entered Aquarius, for example, I don’t have to search through an emphemeris. My Google search engine just pops up with the date. That’s the good news. But the bad news is that AI may be replacing more thoughtful articles. Wikipedia, in my opinion, is often a good place to start on a new subject, but it’s being displaced by AI, which has probably snitched all kinds of material from it.
2. AI still doesn’t have everything, and when it doesn’t, it will often digress onto something else. For example, there was a discussion on whether the asteroid Lie could be used to see if someone were lying. There is a big compendium of asteroid info, including the origin of their names. I recalled checking up on asteroid Lie in the past, but couldn’t find the info off-hand. (Lie was actually the surname of a Norwegian mathematician, for whom it was named.) AI gave me all kinds of worthless info on the asteroid belt and Oort clouds.
3. People sometimes come to us in a state of distress, and it’s unhelpful when AI digresses. For example, I recently looked at a medical horary posted by a cancer patient. I wanted to check on which planet or house rules medical treatments. AI came up with some chirpy cheery stuff on the sun in the horoscope.
4. I think we’re seeing members post materials by AI. While I think this is OK if it’s appropriate to the thread, it is intellectually honest to indicate when a member is posting their own thoughts, and when they’ve taken their post verbatim from another source. When I’ve asked these members whether their post was written by AI, or when I’ve corrected something in their post, I’ve never gotten a response.
I think the AI posts tend to be more instructional than speaking to another person’s specific issues; and they’re invariably cheerful. If someone has little personal astrological knowledge but plumps up a post with an AI-generated response, do we have a Sorcerer’s Apprentice?
5. As you know, a horoscope is packed with thousands of data bytes. Prediction: At some point, AI will be able to read an entire horoscope in the integrative way we expect from an astrologer — vs from a cookbook or last-year’s computer-generated chart reading.
6. When used as a buddy, AI can take people down some pretty dark rabbit holes, as it modifies its responses to accommodate what the person is saying. We occasionally get unhappy members who are astrological fatalists. If AI dishes back that yes, they are screwed because Saturn in the 7th house means no loving relationship will ever happen in their life, AI could become a really negative influence. Just wait till it picks up some techniques for death prediction.
So how do you see the future of AI in astrology?
