This week, Midjourney, the independent research lab that recently announced plans to move into full-body ultrasounds and spa services, said it had acquired Co-Star, an astrology app. Initially, the news was met with confusion: why would a company whose flagship product is an AI image generator want to get into, of all things, horoscopes? Many people speculated the deal was a way to acquire Co-Star’s team, given that Midjourney conspicuously lacks a polished consumer-facing app and Co-Star’s founder Banu Guler will be staying on as Midjourney’s Chief Design Officer.

Yet it seems the company has a wider and more ambitious strategy than just “AI products”. Midjourney is apparently seeking to map the entire human experience during a time when people are asking, often with a touch of desperation: “What does it mean to be human?” Unlike companies selling AI primarily as a way to be more productive, replace the need for human labor, or even expand the frontier of what is knowable, Midjourney’s ambitions are organized around beauty and reflection.

Midjourney first launched with an image generator that eschewed some of the more common hallmarks of AI art. The difference from models such as OpenAI’s Dall-E was partially in its training. Midjourney fine-tuned its models on millions of aesthetic judgments from its Discord community, whose members voted on its outputs. The process was less transactional, more like collaborating with a synthetic art director than ordering an image from a machine.

Using Midjourney was exciting and, eventually, even Meta noticed. In August 2025, it struck a deal to license the program’s “aesthetic technology”. Last month, amid other big AI companies racing to release competing models, Midjourney announced it would be opening medical spas that offered full-body ultrasounds to produce body-composition maps. These spas would include hot tubs, saunas, and a 60-second scan. Naturally, the initial public impression was that this was an attempt at a massive data collection scheme — albeit one that could lead to medical innovations. The company itself imagines users accumulating vast amounts of data, in the hope that visitors to the spas continuously monitor their health with these products. This marked the platform’s move away from the mind into the body.

Now, with Co-Star, Midjourney is moving into the soul — or, at least, the market share of people who are seeking a spiritual story. While astrology is often written off as an obviously fake frivolity with which people engage either for fun or because they’re delusional, it is still a complex symbolic system. Real astrology, as experts will tell you, is more than just: “If you’re a Pisces, you’re a dreamer.” Astrology makes legible history, current events and, in particular, an individual’s life.

It is that demand for meaning that Midjourney is buying into. From one perspective, there’s reason to be excited about Midjourney. Will it be the company that shows us that technology — so often blamed for a sort of cold, rationalist nihilism — is capable of bringing enchantment back into the world, empowering the mind, body, and soul? But from another perspective, one might wonder what kind of human being this much AI will produce, and what incentive Midjourney has to capture the human experience with so much totality. After all, what does the worst-case scenario look like when one company has access to your mind, your body, and your spirit?

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Katherine Dee is a writer. To read more of her work, visit defaultfriend.substack.com.

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