Interpretive Cultures: Resonance, randomness, and negotiated meaning for AI-assisted tarot divination

TL;DR

This paper explores how AI-assisted tarot reading functions as a subjective interpretive practice, examining user interactions, resonance, and meaning negotiation, and offers design insights for AI tools that respect ambiguity and user agency.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for understanding AI in interpretive contexts like tarot, emphasizing resonance and subjective meaning, and provides design recommendations to support such practices.

Findings

Practitioners use AI to navigate uncertainty and explore perspectives.

AI supports resonance and subjective interpretation without causal links.

Design should preserve ambiguity and user agency in interpretive AI systems.

Abstract

While generative AI tools are increasingly adopted for creative and analytical tasks, their role in interpretive practices, where meaning is subjective, plural, and non-causal, remains poorly understood. This paper examines AI-assisted tarot reading, a divinatory practice in which users pose a query, draw cards through a randomized process, and ask AI systems to interpret the resulting symbols. Drawing on interviews with tarot practitioners and Hartmut Rosa's Theory of Resonance, we investigate how users seek, negotiate, and evaluate resonant interpretations in a context where no causal relationship exists between the query and the data being interpreted. We identify distinct ways practitioners incorporate AI into their interpretive workflows, including using AI to navigate uncertainty and self-doubt, explore alternative perspectives, and streamline or extend existing divinatory practices. Based on these findings, we offer design recommendations for AI systems that support interpretive meaning-making without collapsing ambiguity or foreclosing user agency.