ChatGPT returned almost 10 percent in a month after telling BTCNews, a crypto website, how to invest $20,000. Following the chatbot’s guidance, the news site pocketed a gross return of $1,946 in barely four weeks.

Investments in crypto brought in $1,359, stocks $587.

After some training, the AI recommended exact allocations among a variety of stocks and coins.

When asked about digital currencies, ChatGPT offered a list of several. The humans at the news site asked how much to invest in each. The bot recommended 40 to 50 percent of the crypto allocation should be divided between Bitcoin and Ethereum, with 10 to 20 percent of the balance going into less dominant cryptocurrencies.

The humans weighed the advice and finally put 20 percent with each of Bitcoin and Ethereum and split 10 percent among Cardano, Ripple, Solana, and others.

Solana performed best, returning more than twice the profit of Bitcoin.

The bot presented a fairly standard list of stocks, including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. 

However, Rivian, maker of electric pickup trucks, delivered the largest return on investment, even though ChatGPT urged investing less in this stock than any of the others.

The chatbot failed to recommend Meta’s stock, despite the soaring popularity of its Threads social platform. Had the group put money into it, the investment would have returned 10 percent in the trial, more than Amazon or Apple brought back.

Another miss: the bot suggested investing in Waymo, Google’s self-driving car project, but Waymo isn’t publicly traded.

Drug maker Pfizer, which the bot also urged, lost money after it announced a failed trial of an anti-obesity drug. 

“Alongside providing often unreliable advice, a lack of real-time data visibility is one of the biggest flaws in relying on AI models like ChatGPT for investment guidance,” BTCNews wrote in its report on the experiment.

“ChatGPT isn’t going to make you rich by picking stocks,” Todd Stearn, founder and CEO of The Money Manual, told BTCNews, but “ChatGPT might be useful for summarizing evergreen investing techniques or the different styles of investments.” 

“Do you really think a free tool, or even the $20-a-month version, is going to do all the work for you to make you wealthy?” he added. “ChatGPT is a tool. Get skilled using it. But it’s still up to you to make the right financial decisions.”

TRENDPOST: The result of this experiment emphasizes a theme common throughout tests of AI: current generations of artificial intelligence work well as assistants, gathering and sorting data. They’re not great at making decisions. The human factor still prevails. Anyone ignoring that fact is assigning responsibilities to AI that it’s not capable of fulfilling.