OpenAI wants access to your wallet.
On Friday, the company released an early version of its personal finance feature for US-based ChatGPT Pro users. Select users will now be able to connect their accounts at over 12,000 financial institutions to the chatbot, view a financial dashboard of recent account activity, and ask ChatGPT “questions based on your financial context.” press release.
The feature also includes a partnership with financial software company Intuit, where users can schedule sessions with local tax experts within ChatGPT. The goal is to eventually make the feature available to all users.
“When your financial accounts are combined, ChatGPT can combine this insight with your real financial context and what you share about your goals, lifestyle and priorities, helping you spot patterns, understand trade-offs and plan for big decisions.
This could include whether you have a mortgage, if you’re saving for a car, or any debt you’re trying to pay off. ChatGPT can remember all of this to “inform future conversations,” where users can ask the chatbot to analyze changes in spending patterns, identify the biggest risks in their portfolio, or plan to buy a home over the next five years.
If you are wary of giving out sensitive financial information about yourself, especially to an AI chatbot massive data breach Scandal not too long ago, you might be thinking, “Why would I want to do that?” But OpenAI claims there is some existing appetite for it. More than 200 million people ask ChatGPT for help with things like budgeting, investment strategy and future planning every month, the company shared in a press release.
The company also claims that the experience will now be safer with this new tool. Bank accounts will be “securely” closed and ChatGPT “will not be able to see full account numbers or make any changes to your accounts,” OpenAI said. However, the chatbot will be able to access your balances, transactions, investments and liabilities to perform the tasks advertised by OpenAI.
This information will likely be stored by OpenAI and used at least to train its AI models, that is if you select the “improve model for all” option in the settings. You’ve probably already selected this because the setting is automatically enabled for users, although you can easily opt out by toggling the switch off.
OpenAI has not detailed any other ways in which user data may be used other than to train models. But the company, as it is known, backed down some of them previous ChatGPT claims and promises rocky quest for profitability ahead of the rumored IPO. Moreover, both the company and its CEO, Sam Altman, are currently covering each other brilliant legal battle With Elon Musk, some of the evidence and eyewitness accounts that emerged here framed Altman as a man. liaralthough he denies the charges.
Uploading that confidential information can also carry significant risks in the event of a hack, leak, or breach.
“If your documents are part of the AI’s training data, there is a risk that the data will be induced with a specific instruction that malicious actors can use,” said Gang Wang, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. CNN earlier this week when asked about the risks of sharing financial data with AI chatbots. The interview took place before OpenAI announced the feature.
For example, a hacker who misuses ChatGPT to access your recent payments can use this information to craft a convincing phishing email because they will know the date you bought something from a particular merchant and exactly how much you paid.
