TikTok users are turning AI filters into fortunetellers.
Can an AI predict your fate? Can it read your life and draw trenchant conclusions about who you are?
Hordes of people on TikTok and Snapchat seem to think so. They’ve started using AI filters as fortunetellers and fate predictors, divining everything from the age of their crush to whether their marriage is meant to last.
The most viral instances have featured broken-hearted women waxing despondent because their AI filter is erasing the men in their lives from photos of the two of them. To the women, this either means they will never find love again, or that the love they had was doomed.
The trend of using AI signifiers as oracles has taken off more generally as well. TikTok is awash in people swearing fealty to everything from randomized “soulmate” predictors to third-eye detectors. The “soulmate filter” tag has racked up over 30 million views for a bevy of options such as filters showing how far away your soulmate is, when they were born, how compatible you are, and whether you have an AI-generated soulmate ring (indicating you’ve already found your soulmate). Others are using AIs to build on tarot readings, see chakras, or generate horoscopes that don’t sound quite like the ones in your local newspaper (“the stars recommend being in a state of quantum antelope”).
For the most part, these memes aren’t serious, and most come across as pure silliness — though occasionally, things get a little more alarming. One purported actual widow posted her AI-generated oracle erasing her dead husband’s photo. AI may also start detecting ghosts all around your house.
All of these glitches in the matrix may stand out as part of a viral TikTok trend, but they also speak to a larger cultural desire for artificial intelligence to be more than what it is. In its current stage of development, AI is nothing more than a giant collection of data points that can be shaped into predictive patterns. There’s nothing sentient or supernatural about it.
Yet humans inevitably seek ways to humanize AI — and, really, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Humans read into everything. We anthropomorphize robots. We pretend our pets love us. We imagine our lives are being directed by everything from sky gods to playing cards to star patterns.
“It’s fundamentally human for people to want to play with and explore these technologies,” says Karen Gregory, a sociology professor at the University of Edinburgh. “This is the essence and history of divination and gambling. Cards, bones, tea leaves, all manner of objects (whether they are digital or not) can be used to play with change and uncertainty — to play with the question of ‘what next?’”
She explains that “at some level, we are compelled to play.” So it seems inevitable that humans are doing their best to make auto-generated AI bots into predictors of fate.
“In general, we tend to scan for patterns in our environment,” A.J. Marsden, an associate professor of psychology at Beacon College in Leesburg, Florida, tells me. “Our brains are trying to make sense of the world around us and search for any potential threats. Finding patterns helps our brain process information faster in order to make predictions regarding future events.” In other words, with these virtual oracles, we’re doing what we’ve always done — just with newer, quirkier tools.
“What’s happening here is akin to getting ‘a reading,’ much like you would get from a psychic reading or a tarot card reading, except here the subject is your media content,” Gregory tells me. “I think it makes a lot of sense that people are playing and experimenting with TikTok’s AI filters. Social media norms and the broader social context of creating content encourages and rewards this kind of experimentation and meme making.”
Gregory points out that the internet has already given rise to countless forms of digital innovations in New Age practices. Take, for example, the wildly popular Labyrinthos tarot, which comes with a fancy mobile app that auto-generates card readings and meditations with the click of a button. She also notes that there’s a striking similarity between what people are doing with AI online and what people already do with tarot cards — perhaps because the mechanisms we use for making meaning from random results are virtually identical.
“Like a tarot card that has been flipped, whatever the AI generates can be read as personally meaningful and significant, says Gregory. “In my own work on tarot communities, I’ve looked at people’s relationships with tarot cards, and what is happening here seems very similar — the power of the card flip to quickly and almost effortlessly produce something new, insightful, and useful is being found in the AI filter’s response. Once a card has been flipped, your attention has been pulled into a next moment in time, a next possible interpretation. That’s exceptionally valuable in a highly uncertain world.”
You might think from this type of observation that AI fortunetelling would fit seamlessly into established esoteric traditions. Yet while many people are optimistic about the creative possibilities of tarot, others hotly debate their use in the creative sphere of divination.
Some insist that the spiritual essence of divination gets lost when you try to map the creative process onto a machine. In April, longtime druid and tarotologist Dana O’Driscoll wrote a lengthy blog post arguing against the use of AI in divination for a number of reasons. Many of O’Driscoll’s arguments are familiar to anyone who’s followed the ongoing debate over AI and creativity: AI is no substitute for artistic inspiration. But O’Driscoll went further, expressing concern that a reliance on AI pulls people away from a connection with all of the inner spiritual insight that divination is meant to cultivate. “The broader problem as I see it,” she wrote, “is that in mechanizing the world and in turning people into consumers, we’ve also seen a major loss of a really important thing for human development and consciousness — the cultivation of a rich inner life and a deep connection to nature.”
Since O’Driscoll’s animistic philosophy holds that all things, even artificial intelligence, are imbued with a spirit, her concerns enfold the worry that “since AI has been created for obvious capitalist reasons,” the spirits of the machines might be of dubious intent. With AI tarot decks and other metaphysical tools, whatever spiritual energy might be present fills her with skepticism. “What I say is that under no circumstances will I touch anything spiritual that has been created with AI,” she wrote. “Tread very carefully, friends.”
Of course, from a skeptical viewpoint, there are plenty of non-metaphysical reasons that AI-generated oracles are bad news. “Although fun to engage with, in almost every case, divinatory tools are merely coincidences,” Marsden reminds us.
Marsden does concede that many people seem to find a psychological benefit in using tarot and other divination tools as forms of self-reflection. “If I use tarot cards as a way to predict the likelihood of finding a partner, there probably won’t be much benefit psychologically. If, however, I use tarot cards as a form of self-reflection — what am I looking for in a partner, what would make me happy, etc. — then the cards would likely have more benefits to us psychologically.” Science suggests, she notes, that when we do things with intent, like spell-casting or goal visualization, we’re more likely to work hard to achieve the things we want.
Ultimately, though, she argues that any psychological benefit derived from such esoteric tools might not outweigh the cost of deluding ourselves into believing divination is real. “We often find patterns in random phenomena, so any shortcuts based on these patterns would not be reliable. And therein lies the problem with divination. In most cases, we are likely deluding ourselves more than we are truly benefiting ourselves.”
Still, despite being blunt — “AI does not have magic powers, it does not know you better than you know yourself, and it is not revealing special information that should be banked on or trusted” — Gregory holds that it’s a very human trait to be drawn to the promise of an AI oracle. “Much like [a psychic’s] cold reading, the AI doesn’t have any special powers. It’s responding to input and spitting out a response. However, whatever that response is — something beautiful or even gibberish — it can become the grounds for new meaning or new interpretations.” She describes the phenomenon as “a great extension of a very human curiosity to see what comes next and to manage that uncertainty and anxiety.”
And if much of that uncertainty and anxiety involves the question of AI itself, well, perhaps the humanization of your TikTok filter may be all the better to welcome our robot overlords.
Americans shouldn’t take a malaria-free future for granted.
Over the last month, five people in the US (four in Florida and one in Texas) have acquired malaria within the country’s borders. That’s pretty uncommon — at least, in this century; until the 1950s, malaria was a persistent plague in the US, especially in the Southeast.
Many of the conditions that favor malaria’s spread haven’t changed much since then. The Anopheles mosquitoes that spread malaria still thrive in many parts of the country, and states that receive high numbers of travelers from countries where malaria is endemic still have warm, wet weather that favors mosquito reproduction.
Nevertheless, it’s extraordinarily rare for American mosquitoes to be infected with malaria. Since the turn of the last century, there have been only about a dozen cases of local malaria transmission in the US. But the disease remains a major force of destruction elsewhere in the world: In 85 countries across Africa and parts of Asia and South America, malaria caused 240 million illnesses and 627,000 deaths in 2020 alone.
The last spate of local malaria transmission in the US took place 20 years ago. Now circumstances are different: These cases are happening amid rising rates of other insect-borne infections nationwide, and smack in the middle of a heat and wildfire wave that together make climate change’s health risks undeniable. It’s reasonable to wonder whether the US is at risk for becoming a malaria hot spot again.
“Something would have to go seriously wrong for malaria to become endemic in the United States,” said Colin Carlson, a global change biologist at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security who has led research on the rapidly expanding reach of malaria-spreading mosquitoes in Africa.
It’s perhaps the understatement of the year to say the nation is not immune to “things going seriously wrong.” Recent history, ahem, has shown that the country’s public health infrastructure, which Americans rely on to catch and contain invasive infectious diseases, is far more fragile than many realized.
But how vulnerable is the nation, really, to a malaria comeback?
Here’s what the US has going for it — and against it — when it comes to future malaria risk.
The US has some things in its favor in the fight against a malaria resurgence
One key factor the US has going for it is that it’s already eliminated malaria. “Our centralized focus” on getting rid of both malaria parasites and their mosquito hosts’ breeding grounds “really kicked it in the butt,” said Kyndall Dye-Baumuller, a post-doctoral student in vector-borne disease epidemiology at the University of South Carolina’s public health school.
Containing a handful of malaria cases — and eliminating a handful of malaria-infected mosquitoes — is much easier than battling back an infection that’s already entrenched.
That’s also made easier by the fact that most malaria only causes disease in humans and not in any other animal, said Dye-Baumuller. She compared the infection with West Nile virus, another infection spread by mosquitoes that leads to illness in humans and in a variety of wild birds. Because it’s so hard to contain this virus in the bird population, there’s a persistent reservoir of West Nile virus in many parts of the US — and the persistent risk of some crossover to humans. That’s not a risk with malaria.
The US health care and public health systems are plagued with problems that don’t affect other developed nations. But compared with poorer nations, these US systems have more capacity to mobilize against malaria transmission when a case occurs, said Carlson. That’s particularly important now because in the case of malaria, “you want to sort of take people off the grid before onward transmission happens,” he said. “And we’re capable of doing that here.”
The US also has good (if uneven) capacity for controlling mosquito populations — a key element of reducing human risk for infections they transmit.
Sadie Ryan, a medical geographer at the University of Florida who studies the ecology of emerging pathogens, remembers what happened when, as a graduate student, she returned to her northern California home from a trip to Ghana with a malaria infection. The local health department “started hanging traps in my trees in my yard where I rented at the time,” she said. The goal was to ensure no mosquitoes near her home had gotten infected, enabling them to spread the disease to others.
Mosquito control — which experts call “vector control” — is also extremely robust in Ryan’s new home of Florida, a state that has been an entry point for more than one invasive mosquito-borne disease (including the last outbreak of locally spread malaria, in 2003). “We have fairly effective vector control response in places we’re expecting the vectors to be,” she said.
The Anopheles mosquitoes that spread malaria are nighttime biters, so the broad prevalence of window screens and air conditioning in the US offer an additional measure of security against the broad spread of malaria. “Here, mosquitoes mostly stay outside the home,” said Carlson. So even if we deal with a major outbreak, “is it going to be something that every single household is worrying about? Probably not.”
But climate change, travel, and social vulnerability create some undeniable risk
Climate change is one of the key factors that’s making the US increasingly vulnerable to malaria transmission, in part by making more of the country warmer and thus more hospitable to the malaria parasite and its Anopheles mosquito vector.
That could mean an expansion of the malaria risk range well beyond the Southeastern US and into other parts of the US, said Dye-Baumuller. In a recent analysis she led, 32 states had Anopheles mosquitoes capable of spreading malaria.
There is such a thing as weather that’s too hot for most malaria transmission — “A mosquito is not a mosquito is not a mosquito,” said Carlson. When an area’s temperatures don’t dip below 80 degrees F, American Anopheles mosquitoes don’t fly or reproduce as well, and the malaria parasite itself doesn’t thrive.
But that actually means a new, invasive mosquito species could be particularly dangerous in the US: Anopheles stephensi, a type of mosquito that until recently lived only in South Asia and the Middle East, has been on the move. Unlike the American Anopheles species, this pest thrives in hotter temperatures. Also unlike the American species — which prefer to make their families in forested swamps — it loves reproducing in the cleaner water that gathers near human habitation, especially in urban environments.
All of that means the extreme heat that would normally reduce one malaria threat now sets the stage for another, even worse version, should this particular mosquito get entrenched in the US, said Ryan.
“Being prepared for something like that is really essential,” she said — but not all states are prepared. A 2020 report by the National Association of County and City Health Officials judged that only 24 percent of mosquito programs nationwide were capable of seeking out and destroying dangerous mosquitoes in the event of elevated outbreak risk.
“There are large-scale vector control districts in many other states than Florida and Texas,” said Ryan. “But they’re not necessarily anticipating the specific vectors that may show up as climate shifts them around, or as travel moves them around.”
Climate change is also increasing US malaria risk in another way: by increasing infection rates in other parts of the world. While widespread prevention and treatment initiatives have greatly reduced malaria in many endemic countries over the past two decades, a lot of that progress has been undone in some areas of political instability — for example, along the Colombia-Venezuela border, where rising malaria prevalence has raised the specter of spread throughout South America, especially as that continent’s temperatures rise.
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, it shouldn’t be news to anyone that infectious diseases outside the US pose a risk inside the US. The same is true for malaria.
Anyone who enters the US with malaria risks serving as a source of infection to local mosquitoes, and eventually to other people. Most of the malaria cases identified in the US are among Americans returning from foreign travel. That’s largely preventable: While medicines are available to prevent malaria infection during travel, only a quarter of travelers reported taking so-called malaria prophylaxis in 2018.
A variety of persistent social vulnerabilities in the US also help create an environment that favors malaria transmission. Because malaria-spreading mosquitoes bite mostly at night, people who sleep outdoors are at higher risk for infection in the event the disease is introduced — and homelessness is on the rise in the US.
Fundamentally, there’s still enough poverty and poor sanitation in the US to sustain many diseases that should long since have been eliminated, says Carlson. He points at hookworm, a disease transmitted when people walk barefoot on soil contaminated with infected feces, that causes anemia in millions of children and adults worldwide. The parasite’s persistence was recently identified in the poorest part of the Southeastern US — to him, proof that there’s enough neglect and vulnerability in the country to allow almost anything to re-entrench.
To Carlson, hookworm’s persistence sends a warning about malaria risk in the United States. “It will be shocking and sort of impossible to reconcile with how we think of our country if it happens,” he said.
“And also, things happen.”
Here’s why the summer picnic staple is all over TikTok, Instagram, and food publications.
Welcome to Noticed, Vox’s cultural trend column. You know that thing you’ve been seeing all over the place? Allow us to explain it.
What is it: Glorious pasta salads. But these are not your random aunt’s mayo-filled macaroni creations you remember from childhood barbeques. These are aesthetically pleasing bowls with interesting noodle shapes (heard of anellini?) and creative ingredients (halloumi, anyone?). They use fresh produce and Instagram-friendly oil brands, and they sometimes even require cooking rather than just haphazardly chopping items and throwing them together. The dressings? They are homemade.
Where is it: The feeds of food influencers on Instagram and TikTok. On the latter platform, the hashtag #pastasaladsummer now has over 31 million views. Some of the prominent purveyors include food influencers @GrossyPelosi, @babytamago, and @cafehailee. Of course, there’s also an Alison Roman pasta salad, and the trend has even made its way to Good Morning America.
Why you’re seeing it everywhere: Nostalgia mixed with aesthetics. It’s a classic summer gathering dish that can be remade into a colorful wonder with fresh ingredients and pantry staples. “Pasta salad’s the kind of perfect mix of a rebranding of a nostalgic thing,” content creator and cookbook author Dan Pelosi, also known as Grossy Pelosi, says.
Last year, TikToker Katie Zukhovich, a.k.a. the aforementioned @babytamago, was looking for a recipe to bring to a barbecue at her Italian American boyfriend’s house. She was always turned off by the idea of pasta salad drenched in bottled Italian dressings. “It kind of just seemed like a mishmash of vegetables, just like everything but the kitchen sink sort of thing,” she says. But then she had an idea: What if she loaded it up with stuff she loved (tomatoes, roasted red peppers, soppressata, mini mozzarella balls, arugula) and dressed it in a simple vinaigrette? She hashtagged a video of its creation with #pastasaladsummer on TikTok, adding ABBA’s “Chiquitita” as a soundtrack. It currently has 2.1 million views on the platform.
@babytamago Italian pasta salad goes too hard and its so easyyyyy #pastasaladsummer #pastasaladrecipe #italianpastarecipe #summerpasta
♬ Chiquitita - ABBA
This year, she doubled down on pasta salad, anointing herself the “Pasta Salad Queen” with a dose of self-deprecation and kicking things off in April with a green version where orecchiette is nestled in with asparagus, marinated artichokes, olives, and more good green stuff including a pesto-type dressing. She has also made versions with ravioli, with fried capers, and with grilled peaches. And people are loving it. “I didn’t know there was such a cult following for pasta salad, to be honest,” Zukhovich says. “Because every time I post a video, I’ve never seen anything like it. People are like, ‘oh my god pasta salad pasta salad.’” Her pasta salads are even worth suffering for. Case in point, one person commented on the one featuring peaches, marinated tomatoes, and burrata: “As a member of the lactose sensitive community, I made this and am still recovering 4 days later but I would 10/10 do it again.”
So why has pasta salad taken off? “It’s a really easy vehicle to be creative with, so I feel like that’s why creators and chefs like to make different versions of it,” Hailee Catalano, a.k.a. @cafehailee, tells me. “You really can put anything in it, honestly.” Catalano’s most recent involves circular pasta known as anellini with chickpeas, sun-dried tomatoes, and feta, among other goodies. She likes the idea that the pasta’s hole could cradle the chickpea when you eat it.
Most versions are not that hard to make — you chop, you whisk, maybe you do a bit of grilling or marinating — and they look nice, which, as Catalano adds, is good for internet engagement as well. There’s a satisfaction to watching all the disparate parts of the pasta salad come together in shortform video, ultimately resulting in a vibrant medley — no stop in the oven needed. Plus, pasta salad is just a good summer food. It tastes great cold right out of the fridge or even lukewarm after sitting out on a picnic table. It can be made ahead of time. In fact, Pelosi argues that “four days later is when your pasta salad peaks.”
There is without a doubt a lot of innovation happening in the pasta salad space, but another reason that both Catalano and Zukhovich cite for its popularity is one that often drives online impulses: childhood memories — either good or bad.