Don't use Artificial Intelligence for taxes - or share any personal info, says expert

Expert says don't even think of using AI for your taxes

It’s hard to predict where Artificial intelligence will take us but the short cuts AI offers are enticing and evolving. But all of that leads to us trusting that AI is working for our benefit.

FOX 2 - Artificial Intelligence has a way of making mundane tasks easier and less time-consuming.

The backstory:

As we approach the April 15th tax deadline, there is reason to believe that people will be turning to AI to help do their taxes — which may not be a great idea.

Everyone knows someone - or maybe we ourselves are guilty of sharing too much personal information with AI, looking for advice or a short-cut. 

While all of that is useful, that trust can lead to oversharing and the thing about open-source AI like Chat GPT and Gemini, is once you enter your personal information - it becomes public.

Christopher Caen is with Mill Pond Research.

"The models right now are built to be friendly and self re-enforcing," Caen said. "They want to answer you question and people let their guard down."

Mill Pond Research was founded a few years ago. A way to help companies and enterprises safeguard against someone or something using AI for all the wrong reasons. At time, it seems like AI now has a mind of it’s own.

"These agents that can make decisions and I have been in this cybersecurity for a long time and that sounded terrifying," he said.

Here’s what that means. Even if the initial intent was to do something good - AI agents can decide a new objective and inadvertently make your business vulnerable to attack.

"Inevitably this data is going to get repackaged and resold," Caen said. "So now, it’s a whole new engine for releasing our information into the world."

Artificial Intelligence changes the way we tend to search for information. Let’s take Dave Spencer for example. Being on TV and online, his work is accessible by design. It’s easy to Google 'Dave Spencer FOX 2' and come up with content that would take a while to sort through.

"In the future when I type 'Dave Spencer' and hit return in Sales Force, a bunch of agents will run out and retrieve that information for myself," Caen said. "So it’s a huge productivity boost as long as those agents are doing what you expect them to do."

That’s all fine until - you make a mistake.

"We see people put in passwords, and their credentials," Caen said. "It’s amazing what people will put in because the models are so helpful."

 That’s the fear as people start filling out tax returns.

"We are going to see incidents this tax season where people have unintentionally or not put their social security, address, income tax information," he said. "And they aren’t going to understand that with chat gpt being a public model and i go to chat gpt and say give me the social security numbers of the people at fox detroit.. chat is going to find it because you gave it."

That’s not to say there isn’t a place for AI to help.

"The general, help me understand all the moving parts of my tax return," he said. "AI is great at that, saying 'Here is my Social Security Number, do I have all my income statements?' is a terrible thing to do."

 The general rule of thumb when it comes to what to share with AI, do not put any information out there that wouldn’t be comfortable sharing in an email with your boss.