Made openly

How Star Student is made

The pictures are generated. The teaching is not.

Star Student’s card art, the star tutor and the study room were made with AI image generation. That includes nine of the ten decks in the app. The tenth, Classic 1909, is Pamela Colman Smith’s original artwork from 1909, which is in the public domain.

This is on its own page, linked from every other one, because you would want to know and because a lot of people in tarot feel strongly about it. If it is a dealbreaker for you, that is a fair place to land — and far better that you find out here than three lessons in.

Why it was done that way

Star Student is made by one person. A hand-illustrated deck is 78 original paintings; ten of them is seven hundred and eighty. That was not something we could commission and still give the teaching away free. Generated art was the difference between this app existing and not existing, and we would rather say so plainly than dress it up.

What a person actually wrote

All of the teaching. Every one of the 78 cards — what it means upright and reversed, how it shows up in an ordinary week, what it says in each position of a spread, and where the meaning comes from — was written by hand and checked against the traditional sources rather than invented. You can read all of it without installing anything — every card meaning is on this site, free.

• The correspondences follow the Golden Dawn attributions that nearly every modern deck and book descends from.
• Decans, elemental dignities and planetary rulerships are the traditional assignments, not approximations.
• Where the app says the Three of Swords is Saturn in Libra, that is the attribution as it has been taught for over a century.
• The lessons, the Academy subjects, the practice questions and the spaced-repetition scheduling were all designed and written too.

No AI reads your cards

This matters more than the art, and it is where Star Student differs from most of what has launched recently. There is no chatbot in this app. When you draw a card, what you get is the teaching that was written for that card, in the position you drew it.

Your readings are not sent away to be interpreted, because nothing is sent anywhere at all. The app makes no network requests beyond loading its own files, and your journal, your dreams and your saved readings stay in your own browser. You can check that in your browser’s network tab, and we would encourage it. The privacy page covers where your writing actually lives in more detail.

What happens next

The intention is a deck illustrated by a human artist, starting with the 22 Major Arcana, paid for properly. If you are an illustrator and that sounds like your kind of project, we would genuinely like to hear from you: info@starstudent.me.

Questions or disagreement about any of this are welcome at the same address. Otherwise, the app is here and the whole curriculum is free.