Long before artificial intelligence (AI) was accused of threatening writers or illustrators, it quietly hollowed out one of the internet’s strangest and most revealing micro-economies: Etsy witches. These were sellers offering tarot readings, spell work, cord cuttings, hex removals, manifestation rituals, and energetic cleansing services, all carefully labeled as “entertainment” or bundled with PDFs and images to bypass Etsy’s prohibition on intangible services. What they sold was never really magic in the cinematic sense but something far more mundane and powerful, namely reassurance, and the feeling that someone was paying attention to your situation. In many cases, the buyer did not need the spell to work in any provable way, because the act of commissioning it already performed a psychological function.
Etsy witches gained prominence alongside Gen Z’s renewed interest in astrology, manifestation, and spiritual aesthetics, a shift that Vogue recently described as part of a broader search for meaning outside traditional institutions. For a generation raised amid financial instability, political stagnation, climate anxiety, and the long hangover of the pandemic, spiritual language offered a sense of agency without demanding allegiance to organized religion. Witchcraft, in its internet-native form, was flexible, aesthetic, ironic when needed, sincere when desired, and perfectly suited to platforms built on vibes rather than verification. TikTok amplified it, Instagram softened it, and Etsy monetized it.
The platform logic mattered more than belief ever did. Etsy’s algorithm rewarded frequency, keyword density, and conversion rates, not sincerity or ethical care, and as demand surged, the market filled with sellers whose offerings differed in font and thumbnail but not in substance. The descriptions grew longer, more elaborate, and more generic, leaning heavily on phrases that sounded ancient without referencing anything concrete. It was an environment primed for automation long before AI tools became mainstream, because the labor was already abstract and text-based, and the outcome was already unverifiable.
When generative AI entered the picture, it did not disrupt this ecosystem so much as perfect it. Large language models are particularly adept at producing mystical-sounding prose, because spiritual language relies on cadence, metaphor, and symbolic vagueness rather than factual precision. A spell description does not need to be correct in any empirical sense, it only needs to sound right, and AI excels at sounding right while meaning very little. What once required time, emotional labor, and some degree of personal investment could now be generated in seconds, scaled across dozens of listings, and deployed with ruthless efficiency.
Spend time reading through Reddit forums dedicated to Etsy sellers and buyers, and the consequences of this shift become uncomfortably clear. In one widely shared thread, a user described paying nearly twenty dollars for what was advertised as a deeply personalized tarot reading, only to receive a response that read like a generic horoscope, complete with grammatical quirks strongly associated with AI-generated text. Another commenter admitted they tested multiple Etsy witches by purchasing readings from different shops using the same fake backstory, only to receive near-identical responses that referenced life events they had never mentioned. The sense of betrayal in these posts is not theatrical or dramatic but quietly deflating, as if people realized too late that they had paid for the performance of care rather than care itself.
More troubling are the stories involving genuine vulnerability. Several Reddit users have warned that buyers are routinely asked to provide full names, birthdates, and personal details under the guise of customization, information that is then fed into what appears to be an automated process or, in some cases, followed by the seller abruptly closing their shop. One commenter described watching a friend going through a breakup spend money she did not really have on multiple love spells, each one promising urgency and exclusivity, only to realize later that the language across the listings was nearly identical. The anger in these threads is not directed at belief itself but at the sense that desperation has become a revenue stream.
What makes this phenomenon particularly unsettling is that Etsy’s own policies are theoretically designed to prevent it. The platform explicitly bans metaphysical services that claim to influence real-world outcomes, precisely because such services are difficult to verify and easy to exploit. In practice, enforcement is inconsistent at best, and sellers have become adept at navigating the loopholes, labeling spells as entertainment or bundling them with symbolic digital goods. The result is a marketplace where everyone involved understands the fiction, yet the transaction proceeds anyway, lubricated by algorithms and plausible deniability.
This is where the role of AI becomes less about novelty and more about exposure. The Etsy witch economy was always built on emotional labor, symbolic authority, and narrative reassurance, the same ingredients sociologist Eva Illouz identifies as central to the commodification of intimacy under late capitalism. What AI did was remove the remaining friction that made those exchanges feel human. The pauses, the imperfections, the sense that someone actually sat with your words before responding were replaced with instant, polished output that looked convincing enough to pass at a glance.
Anthropologists have long argued that magic functions as a coping mechanism in situations of uncertainty, not as primitive delusion but as a rational response to limited control. Polish anthropologist and ethnologist Bronisław Malinowski observed that rituals flourish where technical knowledge ends, offering psychological structure when outcomes cannot be guaranteed. Etsy witches translated that insight into a digital business model, and AI translated the business model into a content farm.
The irony is that many buyers were never naïve about the metaphysical claims. Several Reddit users openly acknowledge that they did not expect literal results from a spell but valued the sense of comfort and narrative closure it provided. What upset them was not that magic failed but that the exchange felt hollow, automated, and cynical. The disappointment was aesthetic and ethical rather than spiritual, rooted in the realization that intimacy had been simulated at scale.
German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura feels particularly relevant here, not because spells are sacred objects but because aura describes the feeling of singularity that gives an exchange weight. Digital platforms have been eroding aura for years by flattening context and accelerating repetition, and AI simply accelerates that process. When every spell description sounds the same, the illusion of uniqueness collapses, and with it the trust that sustains these fragile economies.
The Etsy witch phenomenon matters because it offers a preview of what happens when symbolic labor meets automation in an unregulated marketplace. Professions built on emotional reassurance, unverifiable outcomes, and language-heavy delivery are especially vulnerable, not because they lack value but because platforms struggle to distinguish care from performance. Therapy-adjacent influencers, manifestation coaches, dating gurus, and even certain forms of lifestyle journalism operate in similar gray zones, where tone and cadence do more work than evidence.
What AI exposes, rather than invents, is the way platforms already incentivize extraction over ethics. The speed and volume of automation make exploitation harder to ignore, but the underlying logic was there long before. Etsy witches were simply early adopters of a system that rewards vibes over veracity and treats vulnerability as a growth opportunity.
There are still real practitioners online, people who approach ritual with sincerity and restraint, but they are increasingly buried under layers of algorithmic sameness. Finding them now requires effort, skepticism, and a tolerance for disappointment, qualities that platforms are not designed to encourage.
