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About Wacky Horoscopes

Wacky Horoscopes was created by me—Alistair Shepherd—as an experiment with machine learning, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs). All horoscopes were generated by an LLM, seeded from an initial 100 manually written examples.

Due to a tendency to produce horoscopes that verged on the violent, they're not fully automatic. I've generated a few thousand, manually reviewed them to ensure they're something I'm happy to post and they'll appear over the next couple of years. This also allows me to generate them on a local machine instead of relying on an API.

A lot of people — myself included — are justifiably extremely critical of LLMs for copyright and environmental reasons. That said, I hypocritically still wanted to experiment with one for a project to have a better understanding, and Wacky Horoscopes was the result of that. To be honest, I'm not sure if I'm comfortable having done so. I continue to be anti 'AI' where the use-cases don't justify it and I think this is one such instance. For what it's worth I used a model claiming to be trained on 'ethical' data sources and as lightweight as I could get decent results from.

I really doubt I will be using an LLM like this again, and would suggest you don't either. That said, it exists, has thousands of horoscopes pre-generated and I'm selfishly publishing it anyway.

Wacky Horoscopes elsewhere

We also post daily automated horoscopes on Twitter and Mastodon:

Credits

A big thank you to everyone who helped me get this off the ground by sending me examples of their Wacky Horoscopes! A shoutout to: Mhairi; G; Eloise Bowyer; Becci Shepherd; and many more. Join this list by contributing to Wacky Horoscopes!