When an artist asked ChatGPT for advice on retirement planning, it told him to open a Roth IRA and some CDs and arrange automatic deposits into his account. “It’s a  lot of information thrown at you pretty quickly,” he said. 

He decided it would be more helpful to talk with a human financial planner. 

Online financial influencer Delyanne Barros asked ChatGPT for investment advice and got cogent information about allocating money to different vehicles, tax planning, withdrawal rates, and other details, she said. 

However, she was able to get that information because she knew what terms to use and what questions to ask, she told The New York Times. 

When she asked her Instagram followers if they had used the chatbot to help them invest, “they’re like, ‘what are you talking about?’” she said. 

“This is going to be a tool to enhance my coaching but it’s definitely not going to be replacing us,” she added. “People still need a lot of guidance.”

Chatbots may not be ready to plan your retirement or help you make a killing in the market, but they already are handling a lot of low-level guidance. 

Intuit, which makes TurboTax, uses AI to make 58 billion financial predictions every day, according to chief data officer Ashok Srivistava.  

The company’s Quickbooks uses AI to advise small businesses on cash flow and offer advice that 95 percent of clients follow, he added.  

“These systems give you plausible ideas but not necessarily correct ones,” Srivistava pointed out. 

“We will want to help CPAs, bookkeepers, financial advisors—everyone in this ecosystem grow and prosper along with the use of AI,” he said to the NYT. 

A personal financial planning and management software called Maybe, now in development, has incorporated Chat GPT to answer basic questions that otherwise would require a human expert. 

“We realized, well, OK, GPT can do this really well,” Maybe founder John Pigford told the NYT. 

However, Pigford and his team had to tackle the chatbot’s quirk of “hallucinating” transactions. 

“It was making up entire transactions and building a backstory, like ‘you bought this item at Home Depot to help cool your living room’,” he said in an NYT interview. “That’s a legitimate problem.” 

Pigford has tamed the chatbot’s tendency to make things up and now hopes to deliver an AI tool that can “offer hyper-personal input and advice, regardless of what your financial situation is” and “without you having to form a relationship with a financial advisor and paying them a couple hundred bucks an hour. 

“I think we’ll have a transition period where we’ll want humans involved for a while,” he added. 

TREND FORECAST: Humans will be necessary to AI for more than a while. 

The more sophisticated AI becomes, the more complex the problems and dangers it will pose. The human combination of knowledge, intelligence, and intuition is the best recipe for solutions and AIs will not be able to blend those elements for years yet, and perhaps decades.