Man Gives All His Financial Info to AI and Lets It Make Decisions

Joshua Browder, the CEO of robo-lawyer startup DoNotPay, says that he handed over his entire financial life to OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model in an attempt to save money.

"I decided to outsource my entire personal financial life to GPT-4 (via the DoNotPay chat we are building)," Browder tweeted. "I gave AutoGPT access to my bank, financial statements, credit report, and email."

According to the CEO, the AI was able to save him $217.85 by automating tasks that would've cost him precious time.

But whether it's really as simple as Browder makes it out to be in his Twitter thread remains to be seen. For one, as the CEO of an AI startup, his opinions on an up-and-coming feature should be taken with a grain of salt.

DoNotPay's track record isn't that stellar, either. The company has been attempting to get a robo-lawyer service off the ground that can take care of things like getting out of a parking ticket on your behalf using AI, but a paralegal found glaring errors in the AI's "ability to craft legal documents."

And embarrassingly, its plans to have an AI inform a defendant in court via a hidden earpiece were stopped in their tracks after human prosecutors warned Browder that such a move could result in jail time.

Then there's the matter of handing a chatbot all your banking login credentials — a move that could come with its own considerable risks, depending on where the data might eventually land.

For DoNotPay's latest trick, Browder had the tool take care of a number of different tasks to save some money.

For instance, the tool started by canceling "useless subscriptions" including a gym subscription, that cost Browder $80.86 a month. Then it got creative, drafting a "persuasive and firm legal letter" to get a refund for a less-than-stellar WiFi service during a United Airlines transatlantic flight.

According to Browder, GPT-4 even managed to negotiate on his behalf to save more than $100 on his monthly Comcast bill.

"We are building DoNotPay Chat to be available as a ChatGPT Plugin, on our website and even via iMessage," Browder promised. "Consumer rights is the perfect job for AI!"

But will it actually work as advertised? Given the amount of sensitive data users would have to give up would require future customers to put a tremendous amount of trust in DoNotPay and OpenAI's LLM.

"Yeah this just smells like a personal info mining scheme," one Twitter user argued.

"I see the value in what you were trying to do here, but I would almost prefer this being in a silo environment rather than GPT for connected to the Internet with access to my online banking," another wrote.

Then there's the fact that GPT-4 infamously loves to make stuff up all the time, and still can't distinguish truth from fiction, let alone make sense of numbers.

In short, DoNotPay has a lot to prove with its claim that it can potentially save customers hundreds of dollars after they agree to hand over all of their most sensitive personal data.

And the most basic objection? If you're not going through your bank statements to cancel useless memberships and dispute unjust charges, you probably just didn't have a very good grasp of your financial health in the first place.

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