We Declare That AI Fortune-Telling Has Lost to Humans
Humans won.
"Humans won"
Last Saturday, we held the first Psychic Hackathon in Shanghai.
It wasn't hard to see that the event took its inspiration from reality shows like Battle of the Psychics and Trial by Oracle. The only difference was that we bumped up the ratio of AI fortune-telling agents in the competition.
Frankly, our original motivation for putting this on was at least partly trolling. Just as those shows are constantly getting exposed for scripted drama, we've never really bought into the idea that someone can read your death certificate off your birth certificate.
So throughout the planning and question design, we maintained a "entertainment first, professionalism second" vibe — figuring that even if nobody could actually divine anything, it'd still be fun to get together and mess around.
The results were nothing like what I expected.
Some of the moments during the psychic sessions were so explosively entertaining that I started second-guessing whether there should even be a second edition.
Here's the field report from the first Psychic Hackathon:
01
The most gifted human psychic of the entire competition, Mingting, had the whole room in awe on the very first question.
We showed the birth time and location of a friend we'll call Sister Huang, and asked contestants to describe her life as comprehensively as possible.
We figured at best someone might get her height, weight, or MBTI. Sister Huang herself said that if anyone could calculate that her two kids had different fathers, they'd win a prize (her exact words).
In reality, most psychics' answers stayed in safe, vague territory — "strong woman," "good at making money," "fierce personality" — which left Sister Huang pretty unsatisfied.
Then Mingting basically doxxed her. Not only did she identify that Sister Huang had two daughters, that the older one was nine, and other private details, she straight-up said Sister Huang was currently right next to Taihu Lake.
Keep in mind Sister Huang was in a car at the time. A minute earlier or later and she wouldn't have been anywhere near that lake. Uncanny.
I suspected she and Sister Huang had coordinated beforehand.
02
While reading Sister Huang, Mingting kept crouching down and fiddling with long thin objects on the floor.
I later learned this is an extremely old-school divination method: Dayan Shifa — you arrange a whole lot of yarrow stalks to observe the hexagram, then interpret reality according to classics like the I Ching.
Beyond that, she told me she'd formed a deep connection with Sister Huang, and hadn't even disconnected by the time the question ended. That's why she was so accurate.
We lost. In the connection game, Brother Feng lost.
03
Speaking of Brother Feng, we'd originally planned to show a childhood photo of him and have contestants divine what he's up to now.
We were genuinely curious about this ourselves.
The only problem: Brother Feng doesn't believe in fortune-telling, so we couldn't get his photo. We ended up grabbing a picture of Brother Sun from X instead, asking everyone to guess what the kid would grow up to do — a budget substitute.
The result? Some contestants had no sportsmanship and just used AI image recognition to search up Brother Sun's entire life story.
A failed question.
04
But one expert did analyze young Brother Sun's face and concluded:
"His hair grew in really well as a child, but his upper face is relatively high overall, with a full forehead — good academic fortune, very smart. His middle face, the tip of his nose is very round, strong money-making ability.
Is he suited for government work? No, because his ears aren't close to his head. This type was probably rebellious as a kid, hard to manage, but his own thinking is very solid.
As for his mouth, his upper lip is relatively thin. This kind of person doesn't value loyalty and friendship much — watch out if you're friends with him."
Brother Sun, is this true?
05
Oh right, we also hid a Bitcoin on site.
Looked like this.
Where did we hide it? This got the most enthusiastic responses. Nearly every contestant showed off their vocabulary of furniture and appliances.
They named every describable location in the room, and nobody got it right.
Until. AI psychic Winnie used Cemiao (a divination app) and said the Bitcoin was actually inside something "related to the ocean" — a box, specifically, the refrigerator.
It really was in the fridge. Though whether she actually divined it or just used process of elimination, I reserve judgment.
06
We also had a "guess this person's cause of death" question, but worried about offending the deceased.
After much deliberation, we decided the only solution was to find a living person, Photoshop their photo into black and white, and use it as a memorial portrait.
Strangely, nearly all my friends refused this request.
Fortunately, Red — a friend who insists he doesn't believe in any supernatural forces — voluntarily provided his photo and birth details, allowing the competition to proceed.
Let us mourn — I mean, thank you, Red.
07
At the competition, theories about Red's cause of death varied widely.
Popular guesses included crime of passion, car accident, and illness. One psychic swore that Red had been brought to justice for playing with women's feelings.
In reality, Red was not brought to justice. This was revealed when I video-called him on the spot.
A contestant leaned into my screen and asked Red: I calculated that you work in finance, is that right?
Red said: Does stock trading count?
08
But one master did calculate that Red wasn't dead.
Human psychic Mingting told me privately that she saw through the organizers' setup, but chose not to expose it based on complex fate-calculation reasons.
AI psychic Duck, meanwhile, stated that although Red is alive now, he may die in 2035 from natural aging or cardiovascular disease.
Red is 30. Good reminder.
09
There were two "shoot the cover" questions — basically, guess what we put in the pot.
One pot contained air. The other pot contained a smaller pot.
We received protests.
10
It wasn't only psychics who could participate.
We invited several audience members on stage and had contestants guess who had the highest education, who had the lowest, whose job was AI-related, and who a certain audience member's last message was sent to.
We later realized this was completely solvable just by looking at their OOTD.
Turns out fortune-telling and stereotyping both run on the same underlying principle: big data.
11
The final question was about palmistry.
Though both Muqiu and I enthusiastically offered close-ups of our hands, getting enough photos was still tough.
Too many people refused — they felt exposing their right hand to fifty psychics was dangerous. Xianyu, for example.
Understandable. What if someone with bad intentions decided to match your right hand with someone's left hand in a ghost marriage?
Anyway, that's why I ended up using the palmistry of Jensen Huang, the Sichuan Tangerine-in-Chief, and the Respected Leader for the question. They all love waving, so photos were easy to find.
The last hand was actually AI-generated
12
The question was: among these people, who's from Shanghai, who's from the capital, who's the richest, and who isn't straight?
The non-heterosexual was easy to find — I'd worked at a fashion magazine before, so I just screenshotted my WeChat Moments.
The capital resident — I'd been in Beijing long enough to know one or two people. Plus the Respected Leader is also from a capital. Don't sleep on Pyongyang.
For the Shanghai native, I wanted Zhou Libo to make a cameo, but couldn't find a single photo of him showing his hands anywhere online. So I just didn't include one — an invisible Shanghai native.
As for whether Jensen Huang, the Sichuan Tangerine-in-Chief, or the Respected Leader is actually the richest, we couldn't figure it out ourselves, so we just had them tie.
13
At the awards ceremony, we discovered the commemorative banner we'd prepared had gone missing.
We had to ask Winnie, who'd previously located the Bitcoin, for help. She went with her intuition, and — damn, she got it right again.
I'm starting to suspect Cemiao is actually pretty accurate. Not an ad.
After all, it's not like she was the one who hid it.
All in all, thank god for psychics — otherwise the awards ceremony would've been a bust.
14
Finally, an apology:
To Mr. Zhang: an audience member at the event mentioned that he needs three random numbers every time he casts a hexagram. I looked it up and learned that the person providing random numbers might lose something called "blue bar," a health-related life object.
After careful consideration, on the day of the event, I had Doubao, the AI software under ByteDance, perform several random number generation tasks. Experts say that in this case, the "blue bar" loss should be borne by its ultimate beneficiary.
Wishing you eternal life and immortality.
Thank you to Tezign and Mumian Capital for their generous support of this event. We'll do it again next time, see you then.
(This article's cover image was generated by ChatGPT; the writing is purely human)
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