Algorithmic fate and affective practice: Understanding digital spirituality through AI fortune-telling among Chinese youth

AI fortune-telling intertwines generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) with traditional divinatory practices, emerging as a new form of digital spirituality. This study examines how young Chinese users engage with AI fortune-telling within a socio-cultural context shaped by enduring traditions of fate discourse and intensifying uncertainties of late modern life. Drawing on qualitative analysis of user practices on Chinese social media platforms, the findings move beyond a binary framework of belief and disbelief, revealing three interrelated modes of engagement: affective resonance, playful engagement, and digital hybridity. This study conceptualizes AI fortune-telling as a flexible cultural practice through which users negotiate fate through technological mediation. By foregrounding this tension, this study extends affective practice theory into the domain of human–AI interaction, demonstrating how algorithmic systems become entangled with culturally embedded ethics and everyday sensemaking. It offers new insights into how digital technologies reconfigure the affective and spiritual dimensions of subjectivity in algorithmic societies.