{"id":9262,"date":"2026-03-08T15:15:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-08T15:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/taxes-with-ai-disaster\/"},"modified":"2026-03-08T15:15:00","modified_gmt":"2026-03-08T15:15:00","slug":"taxes-with-ai-disaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/taxes-with-ai-disaster\/","title":{"rendered":"Using AI to Do Your Taxes Is Likely to Backfire Spectacularly"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Tax season, that dreaded time of year, is upon us. But if you were hoping that newfangled AI tech could help you file the laborious paperwork \u2014 and perhaps find a way of saving you a few bucks \u2014 think again.<\/p>\n

After testing several four leading AI chatbots, the New York Times <\/em>found<\/a> that all of them struggled to pick and fill out the correct forms, fumbling key calculations. In all, the bots miscalculated the tax money owed to the IRS by an average of more than $2,000.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem with taxes is all those very small little details matter, and it\u2019s not going to get every single little detail right,\u201d Benedict Evans, an analyst who writes a technology newsletter, told the NYT<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese models get dramatically better over the course of every six months,\u201d he continued. \u201cBut they still give you what is roughly the right answer, and that\u2019s not what you want.\u201d<\/p>\n

AI can be useful for processing and summarizing large amounts of information, but it struggles with precision in virtually every domain. Chatbots will often fabricate false factual claims, even when asked to summarize a single document. AI programming assistants will slip errors into their code<\/a>. Image generators produce strange visual artifacts and inconsistencies.<\/p>\n

The conundrum is the same with arithmetic. Pair that with byzantine tax laws and all its corresponding, highly specific forms, and you have a recipe for, if not disaster, then a taxing and expensive back-and-forth with the IRS.<\/p>\n

To test the AI models \u2014 OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT, Anthropic\u2019s Claude, Google\u2019s Gemini, and xAI\u2019s Grok \u2014 the NYT <\/em>had them attempt to solve a series of tax scenarios described in training materials by the tax service TaxSlayer. Only after supplying the models with highly specific instructions, like where each piece of information should go in each IRS document, did the AIs begin to fare better.<\/p>\n

That, you might argue, defeats the point of using an automated tool in the first place. Your average joe uses overpriced tax software precisely because they don\u2019t know the nitty gritty of the process.\u00a0S<\/strong>oftware like TurboTax or TaxAct \u201cis procedural, following \u2018if-then\u2019 logic built for mathematical precision,\u201d Erik Brynjolfsson, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, explained to the NYT<\/em> \u2014 whereas large language models are prediction engines that \u201ccan be superhuman at many tasks yet fail at some that seem simpler to humans.\u201d<\/p>\n

A prime example of how hallucinating LLMs can cock up your tax homework? TurboTax\u2019s own experiments with the tech<\/a>. When the tax software company deployed its \u201cIntuit Assist\u201d chatbot to answer tax questions, it would spin off irrelevant answers. When the answers were on topic, they were often wrong.<\/p>\n

More on AI:<\/strong> Grammarly Offering Manuscript Reviews by AI Versions of Recently Deceased Professors<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The post Using AI to Do Your Taxes Is Likely to Backfire Spectacularly<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Tax season, that dreaded time of year, is upon us. But if you were hoping that newfangled AI tech could help you file the laborious paperwork \u2014 and perhaps find…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9262\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}