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Filing taxes is painful enough that many people would happily hand the job to a robot. In the age of generative AI, where chatbots can crank out a decent-sounding school essay in under a minute, it's tempting to think your tax return could be next.
There's just one small problem. The Internal Revenue Service expects financial data to be accurate, not just "close enough."
I asked some tax experts whether you should have a general-purpose AI chatbot like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity do your taxes for you. The answer was clear.
"I don't recommend that at all," said Travis Thompson, a tax attorney and director in the business and finance group at the firm Fennemore.
"My advice would be no," said Sterling Raskie, senior lecturer of finance at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Tax season makes everyone look for shortcuts. Federal income tax returns are nightmarish and complicated -- and that's exactly what makes them unsuited for a chatbot. AI is very good at sounding right even when it's wrong.
Still, if you can't afford to hire a trusted, trained human to help with your taxes, there are some things generative AI can be useful for during tax season.
You can't trust AI to be accurate
The capabilities of a generative AI model are impressive. But let's remember that, at their core, these educated-guess machines are simply finding patterns and offering plausible results. They can't distinguish approximation from the truth.
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