Money / Making Money

6 Ways You Should Not Try To Use ChatGPT To Make Money

October 4, 2023

4 min Read

Written by Jordan Rosenfeld

Edited by Gary Dudak

Woman use AI to help work or use AI everyday life at home.

Supatman / Getty Images

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ChatGPT has been the internet’s favorite new toy. The large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence developed by OpenAI purports to be able to write just about anything you can imagine needing, from letters to essays to term papers and even fiction.

The AI has been “trained” on internet-based information (such as blog posts, books, articles and even Wikipedia). However, its ability to do is also posing both legal and ethical concerns.

Currently, the Authors Guild along with a group of well-known and bestselling authors, including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen and Jodi Picoult, have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI claiming mass copyright infringement without compensation. The suit alleges that because OpenAI has received training based upon these and other authors’ books, its intent to produce similar content is essentially a form of producing “derivative works” (similar to plagiarism).

All of this poses another question related to personal finance: What are some ways that people should not use ChatGPT to attempt to make money for either ethical, legal, or other reasons? Let’s take a look.

Writing Content for Hire

If your money-making gig involves producing written content, from marketing copy to content writing or articles, using ChatGPT may not be a good idea because you may be inadvertently producing content that is like plagiarizing. Additionally the “voice” of the content that ChatGPT produces may not be as close to your own or to the tone of the work you need to produce, making it more work than it’s worth to revise what it produces.

Jobs Involving Accurate Research

One of ChatGPT’s biggest failings is its inability to fact-check its own work. It is, by and large, a mimicking tool — it can reproduce what it has seen in any number of styles and tones, and can appear to produce reliable research with realistic looking links and sources.

The problem is, these are often false or incorrect in some other way. If your job relies upon accurate research, don’t use ChatGPT, or at the very least, fact-check everything. An article in the Washington Post described some of ChatGPTs snafus as “wildly wrong.”

Investing Advice

ChatGPT might seem like a free financial advisor at your fingertips, and while you certainly can get some information that’s not all bad, it’s probably missing some vital information a human financial advisor can give you. To test this theory, Fortune pitted the AI against a human financial advisor, and found that while ChatGPT could come up with useful information quickly, it missed many nuances.

The Fortune writer explained that when both a human and AI were presented with the same query, “ChatGPT focused only on the presenting question and ignored other goals such as homebuying, new car, and didn’t factor in Social Security benefit or other retirement concerns.”

Anything That Requires Math

While ChatGPT can sometimes get math correctly by drawing from existing correct calculations that it was trained on, it is not programmed to perform math calculations of any kind — it plain gets things wrong. Therefore, relying on it to do math is like asking your Roomba to meal-plan for you. If you need accurate math for any money making endeavor, ChatGPT is NOT your friend.

Use Caution for Resumes, Cover Letters and CVs

If you use ChatGPT to help prepare your resume, cover letters to more complex curriculum vitaes (CVs), make sure you are double and triple checking its work after. You don’t want to embarrass yourself by presenting typos, awkward grammar or incorrect statements, especially about your own skills. ChatGPT is a mimic, not an English professor or a fact-checker.

Anything Requiring Tight Security

If you’re working on something that is private or needs to remain secure, using ChatGPT is not a great idea right now. According to MakeUseOf, OpenAI stores your chat history on its servers, and might share some of it with third-party groups. It has also already experienced at least one security breach which shared people’s information with others.

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