This study examines religious biases in AI-generated financial advice, focusing on ChatGPT's responses to financial queries. Using a prompt-based methodology and content analysis, we find that 50% of the financial emails generated by ChatGPT exhibit religious biases, with explicit biases present in both ingroup and outgroup interactions. While ingroup biases personalize responses based on religious alignment, outgroup biases introduce religious framing that may alienate clients or create ideological friction. These findings align with broader research on AI bias and suggest that ChatGPT is not merely reflecting societal biases but actively shaping financial discourse based on perceived religious identity. Using the Critical Algorithm Studies framework, we argue that ChatGPT functions as a mediator of financial narratives, selectively reinforcing religious perspectives. This study underscores the need for greater transparency, bias mitigation strategies, and regulatory oversight to ensure neutrality in AI-driven financial services.

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a transformative development in artificial intelligence (AI), drawing significant attention from industry and academia. Trained on vast datasets, these sophisticated AI systems exhibit impressive natural language processing and content generation capabilities. This paper explores the potential of LLMs to address key challenges in personal finance, focusing on the United States. We evaluate several leading LLMs, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, and Meta's Llama, to assess their effectiveness in providing accurate financial advice on topics such as mortgages, taxes, loans, and investments. Our findings show that while these models achieve an average accuracy rate of approximately 70%, they also display notable limitations in certain areas. Specifically, LLMs struggle to provide accurate responses for complex financial queries, with performance varying significantly across different topics. Despite these limitations, the analysis reveals notable improvements in newer versions of these models, highlighting their growing utility for individuals and financial advisors. As these AI systems continue to evolve, their potential for advancing AI-driven applications in personal finance becomes increasingly promising.

It has been known to create paintings, write poems and even learn languages on its own. But could Artificial Intelligence also make you richer? Last week, it emerged JPMorgan Chase is developing a service similar to the AI-powered ChatGPT which would help customers select investments and give financial advice. Separately banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have started testing the tech internally as businesses speed up their apparent AI arms race. It begs the question whether financial advisors will be needed at all in a few years as computers offer a quicker (and cheaper) alternative.

You may have noticed a lot of news stories (and tweets, for that matter) about ChatGPT -- a newly released "chatbot" from the folks at OpenAI. It's notable because it uses artificial intelligence (AI). Many people are trying it out, with interesting results. For example, one person used it to write cover letters for jobs. They were reasonably well received, but deemed to not reflect much personality.

Back in 2019, I wrote a piece for Wired making the rather obvious prediction that in time robots would take over from people in banking just as they have done in manufacturing. Was I predicting that you would be served by an android when you go into your local bank branch a decade from now? For one thing, you won't be going to a bank ten years from now under any circumstances -- whether in the metaverse or the universe -- and nor will anyone else. That is just the sort of tedious and time-consuming thing that robots should be doing instead of people, which is why I said that the big change in financial services will come not when banks are using AI, but when customers are. Last year here on Forbes I doubled down on this view of the future of financial services, saying the that the battle for future businesses will take place in a landscape across which customers' bots will roam to negotiate with their counterparts (ie, other bots at regulated financial institutions) to obtain the best possible product for their "owners".

For best-in-class artificial intelligence solutions to actually earn that designation, Sindhu Joseph warns that the tools can't be used as "set it and forget it." Joseph, the co-founder and CEO of CogniCor, a California-based developer of an AI-powered business automation platform, reminded those attending her panel on day two of the inaugural Future Proof festival of the massive failure that was Microsoft's Tay. In spring 2016, the AI chatbot, named as an acronym for "thinking about you," was launched and pulled within a day of operation. Its machine-learning capabilities had caused it to spew racist, misogynistic and anti-semitic statements across Twitter, in a spectacular public display of garbage in, garbage out. Just "letting the machine run" without proper human guidance or care is a huge pitfall, said Joseph, who holds a PhD in artificial intelligence and is the inventor of six patents related to the technology. "There's a lot of applications where that works really well.

Financial advisors are starting to be big fans of artificial intelligence (AI)--not only because it can automate administrative tasks like data entry but also because it is starting to have a significant impact on the client-advisor relationship. "Against increasingly challenging market conditions, AI has the potential to help wealth managers sustain and drive new growth, create operating efficiencies, and transform the customer experience through more hyper-personalized insights and products," said Scott Reddel, who leads the North American wealth management practice at consulting firm Accenture. "Now isn't the time to take your foot off the pedal. Firms can overcome adoption speedbumps with continued commitment from management, focused applications that deliver business value, and--perhaps most critically--collaboration across business lines." Accenture recently released new research, "AI in Wealth Management: A Financial Advisor Study," after surveying 500 licensed financial advisors in the United States and Canada earlier this year who work at major wealth managers, banks, insurers, and independent wealth firms.

"Rising demand is driving the boom of digital humans," says Shiyan Li, head of the digital human and robotics business at Baidu, which created the digital model-actor, Gong. "In China alone, there are over 400 million ACGN (animation, comics, games, and novel) fans, and an enterprise market worth hundreds of billions of dollars centered on digital humans." And according to a company that tracks business registrations, Qichacha, China now has more than 280,000 enterprises that engage in digital human-related activities. The debut of Baidu's digital celebrity may not seem like much at first, as the concept of "virtual idols" has been around for years. For example, US virtual influencer Lil Miquela has been appearing alongside real human celebrities in online advertisements and TV commercials since 2016, gaining over three million Instagram followers.

Advisors are using artificial intelligence to expand access to wealth management insights. Traditional financial plans often required multiple meetings between advisors and clients with frameworks left to stagnate outside the meetings, but the inclusion of AI has allowed that conversation to become continuous, Sam Palmer, managing director and head of strategy, digital wealth planning & advice for JPMorgan Wealth Management, said during a panel discussion at Financial Planning's INVEST conference in June. "What has started with clients having to interact with an advisor, even to be able to trade stocks moving over through access to digital tools and automation, is [now] more tools in the hands of consumers for financial planning and financial health," Palmer said. "We are able now to have continuous monitoring as an individual [and] as a consumer of my cash flow." This eliminates the need for simple one-off conversations with an advisor.

This has heightened the need for wealth management firms to embrace technology, including artificial intelligence, to arm their advisors with data and tools that will improve the quality of advice and how it is delivered. And yet when it comes to exploring AI to help advisors onboard new clients and provide more relevant advice to existing ones, most firms are stuck in low gear, with few putting the technology at the core of their business. Indeed, less than one-third of the wealth managers we surveyed are scaling AI across their businesses. Part of the problem is getting buy-in and engagement from financial advisors who need convincing that insights created by AI will be actionable in their day-to-day roles. In some instances, recommendations provided by AI don't match clients' immediate needs or stages of life.