The Problem With “Free” Readings: AI, Psychic Scams, and What No One Tells You About Online Tarot

Long before I mastered Tarot for myself (and in those moments I really needed someone else to do it), I’d happily choose “free” over paying half a fortune to get my fortune read.

And honestly? I don’t want to relive the times in my life when “paycheck to paycheck” was more like drowning month after month in the red. The idea of paying for a reading during those stretches—no matter how much I needed one—felt laughable. If someone suggested it, I’d snort. Hard.

So if you’re dead-set on not paying for Tarot readings, I’m not here to shame you. But there are some crucial truths about the nature of Tarot, Tarot readers, and the whole psychic marketplace that you need to know, so you can protect both your sanity and your bank account. Let’s break it down.

Charlatans and Grifters and Cons, Oh My!

Every year, there’s new algorithm updates to web searches, social media feeds, and targeted ads being touted as necessary to save us from this group of “unsavory” businesses, influencers, and other such entities. They’re the spam that doesn’t sound like spam. They’re the clickbait you can’t ignore. They’re the posers that sound like the real thing.

And yet, these very grifters draw attention. They get the clicks. They get the shares. They get the comments, cross media mentions, and ever-increasing follower counts. In other words, they are the exact engagement engines in human form that all those algorithm updates are designed to reward, literally pushing everyone else out of your sphere of awareness completely. As long as you keep interacting with them, you’re feeding them and the algorithms that lift them up.

Sure, the grifter accounts may offer free readings from time to time with promises of “You’ll never have to pay a dime!” But oh, you’re paying them alright. Your engagement with them. Your reviews and word-of-mouth reputation building (yes, even the critical feedback and, espeicially, your angry venting). Your time spent on their channels, apps, websites, etc. All of it is revenue for them. Even if you never purchase a single offering from them, you’re making them money just by nature of being there. You’re rewarding them without realizing that they’ve been conning you the whole way with inauthentic, fake, or even AI-generated readings.

No matter what the app promises or how slick the online experience, AI can’t do psychic readings. Whether we’re talking about a chatbot, a fancy Tarot card app, or a paid LLM tool, it’s all just code. AI lacks physical, emotional, and sensory input mechanisms. There’s no intuitive hits, no energetic connection, and no real insight. And we definitively know this because AI can’t feel or sense like an actual organic being with more than just a brain.

You can prompt the AI to give you a realistic-sounding Tarot reading. It can speak the lingo. It can match a question to an ideal spread out of the Tarot spreads that exist publicly that it can access. It can “randomly” draw cards and assign it to a position within that spread. It can weigh the traditional meanings of the cards against the placement in the spread and within the context of the question. It can then infer possible–even likely–meanings based on all those factors.

In other words, it can only give you what you could give yourself thinking purely with logic, reasoning, and without trying very hard.

But the AI can’t give you a proper psychic Tarot reading because it has no way of “picking up on” or receiving the full data set in the way a living, breathing, sensing human can. As medical, biological, and psychological research continues and deepens, we know full well that humans possess far more senses than the five basic ones we were taught as children. AI doesn’t even have that. It only has training data, algorithms, and maybe internet access. It doesn’t have the basic hardware required to be intuitive, let alone dip into those more mysterious sensory experiences we lump under the term “psychic”.

Even if you self-describe as not having a psychic bone in your body, you are a thousand times more psychic than every AI that exists to date.

No matter your reason for seeking out free readings, just remember that authentic readings will cost something; whether that’s money, time and effort to share in a learning experience with others, or just getting up off your couch and into the community for a couple hours. Those endlessly generated app readings? They’re costing you in ways you won’t notice until you’re already hooked.

Skip the nonsense. Quit giving grifters your attention. Invest your time and energy in authentic experiences that actually empower you to live better, not just click more.