Ancient Mesopotamian scholars wrote omens as conditionals. If a certain bird appears at a certain time, then a certain thing befalls the king. The texts are vast, meticulous and systematic, built on the premise that unrelated events are secretly linked and the link can be read by an expert.
Gaston Welisch’s House of IFs takes that structure and hands it to an AI agent pipeline pointed at today’s news. The result is a daily omen, in the original IF/THEN grammar, published at ifthen.today and featured by CreativeApplications on September 15.
How it works
The system:
- Pulls current events through news and search APIs
- Pairs an unusual event with a major news story
- Searches historical archives, using semantic embeddings to organize them spatially, for a past pairing with a comparable relationship
- Writes the resulting prediction as a conditional omen, drawing associated imagery from museum collections
The front end is JavaScript with a Flask backend. There’s also a physical version: an e-paper display driven by a Raspberry Pi Pico, with an accelerometer and haptic motor, so consulting the oracle is a thing you hold and shake rather than a page you load.
The argument
Welisch’s framing is precise, and it’s the reason this is more than a clever generator: large language models are extremely good at constructing plausible-looking explanations between distant pieces of information.
That’s usually described as a defect — hallucination, spurious correlation, apophenia. House of IFs treats it as the core competency and then builds the historical form that already did exactly this job. Ancient divination and modern predictive systems share a method: gather enormous quantities of observation, find correlations, present the correlation as knowledge about the future, and derive authority from the size of the archive and the expertise of the reader. Swap clay tablets for embeddings and the structure survives intact.
Putting the output in cuneiform-style conditionals makes an AI prediction legible as what it is: an assertion that two things are connected because a system that has read a great deal says they are.
The namburbi
The detail that keeps the piece from being merely cynical is the namburbi. In Mesopotamian practice, a namburbi was an apotropaic ritual: a counter-action that could avert a predicted fate. Every omen House of IFs generates comes with one.
That’s a real argument, not a decoration. Predictive systems — credit scoring, policing, recommendation, forecasting — get their power from being treated as descriptions of an inevitable future. The ancient practice, supposedly the superstitious one, assumed that a foretold outcome could be argued with and acted against. Building that into the work says the future it describes is contestable, which is more than most contemporary predictive systems will concede.