Why 1 in 4 Americans uses AI for medical advice
More Americans are turning to artificial intelligence for quick answers about their health, and in some cases, bypassing doctors altogether.
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Half of Americans now turn to AI for financial advice. Is that a good thing?
In a surprisingly short period of time, artificial intelligence has moved from the fringes of financial planning to the center stage. A recent study by TD Bank found that the percentage of Americans using AI to manage their household finances has jumped from 10% in 2025 to 55% in 2026.
If that’s true, AI has become a more popular financial advisor than actual financial advisors. According to a 2025 Gallup poll, only about two-fifths of Americans seek advice from a financial professional.
Half of Americans are asking AI financial questions, and the answers could be used to save and invest trillions of dollars. Everyone says AI is getting smarter, but chatbots have been known to “hallucinate” and make up things.
“There’s something dangerous about just believing what a computer tells you about something,” said Luke Delorme, a certified financial planner in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and author of several books on AI.
With this concern in mind, a team of researchers from MIT and Stanford University set out to study what questions Americans asked AI about money and what AI answered accordingly.
“This happened very quickly,” says Taha Chokmane, assistant professor of finance at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. “I wanted to know what kind of advice they were getting.”
Choukhmane and his colleagues asked 1,000 Americans to write down questions they might send to a chatbot. They then entered prompts through the chatbot and studied their responses.
How effective is financial advice from a chatbot?
They found that, essentially, the answers you get from AI are almost the same as the questions you ask. Their findings are published in a research paper titled “AI Financial Advice: Supply, Demand, and Life Cycle Implications.”
In most cases, the AI chatbot advised the human correspondent on sound financial behavior: saving money for emergencies. Invest in the stock market, preferring low-cost index funds. Limit your exposure to risky investments, especially as you get older.
But AI struggles with the nuances of investing, researchers found.
For example, a chatbot might not talk about rebalancing or buying or selling assets to maintain a certain level of risk within a portfolio.
Also, chatbots may not understand the concept of smoothing consumption and adjusting the balance between spending and saving over time to maintain a standard of living.
Researchers found that AI consistently provided better advice to people who asked better questions.
As an experiment, they divided the AI queries into two groups. Questions written by people with low financial literacy and prompts written by people with high financial literacy.
The more financially savvy you are about the questions, the more intelligent the answers you will get.
By modeling investments based on AI responses, researchers found that investors’ returns increased by about 5% over time if the original chatbot query was made with high financial literacy.
“For people who already know a little bit about finance and financial literacy, AI might be a little more helpful,” Chalkmane said.
The study also found that when users are used to asking AI questions about money, the AI becomes more responsive and improves investment results. Novice users of the chatbot received only weak answers.
Are chatbots sexist?
Researchers have discovered a strange gender disparity in AI advice. When the chatbot answered questions from women, it returned more conservative advice.
“AI tends to encourage women to take less risk in the financial markets and invest less in the stock market,” Chokmane said. “Whenever the AI learns that you are a woman, it tends to push or steer you toward safer assignments.”
Digging deeper, the researchers found that part of the reason the AI gave women different advice was because they asked different questions. Men were more likely to talk about stocks. Women were more likely to talk about debt and ask about lower-risk investments.
But some of the gender bias remained even when researchers asked the same questions of AIs they thought were talking to men or women.
Researchers could only speculate as to why. Perhaps the AI gave a different answer for women because it assumed women had more conservative goals. Perhaps the chatbot acted on gender biases it learned from the literature it read.
Sam Taub, chief investment writer at NerdWallet, said gender bias is “known to be an issue for human financial advisors.” “AI doesn’t seem to completely solve this problem.”
As AI reaches more users, risks are increasing
With the proliferation of AI content, the stakes are even higher as chatbot financial tips reach a wider audience.
In another study, another group of researchers assessed the quality of full-text articles about investing written by AI.
Researchers from Harvard Business School and Boston College examined thousands of articles published on Seeking Alpha, a popular website for crowdsourced content in the marketplace.
Using an AI detector, researchers found that at one point, 13% of Seeking Alpha’s articles were AI-assisted. When the site banned AI in 2023, its share dropped to 4%.
The researchers found that AI-generated articles were quantitatively inferior.
Articles powered by AI received fewer comments from readers. These were less likely to be cited as “Editor’s Picks.” And the stocks they covered had lower trading volumes and lower average returns than stocks featured in human-written articles.
There were other subtle differences as well. Financial advice written by humans is based on personal anecdotes, hunches, and emotions. AI advice was relatively impersonal and general.
“Contributors will be talking about their own experiences and experiences using the product,” said Yuan Zou, assistant professor of accounting and management at Harvard Business School. “As everyone uses AI, there will be fewer and fewer of those perspectives on the platform.”
In their paper, the researchers cited comments from Seeking Alpha editors to explain why the site felt compelled to ban AI.
“The research and analysis prepared by the ‘bots’ will essentially reduce the content on Seeking Alpha to one view: the bot view,” the editors wrote.
