The war on the stolid and depressing practice of actually thinking seriously about your own fucking life for a single minute opened up a new and exciting front today, as OpenAI announced that users of its creeping conceptual tumor fun AI buddy ChatGPT will now be able to connect their bank accounts to the company’s digital eyes and tendrils. With just a few mindless jabs of your thumbs, you’ll now be able to invite this multi-billion-dollar corporation’s various data scrapers to intimately pore over your personal finances, because apparently that’s preferable to just keeping track of a goddamn budget.
This (minus the swearing) is all per TechCrunch, which notes that OpenAI is simply meeting people in the stupid places where they already live: ChatGPT users apparently already pepper the chatbot with sensitive questions about their personal finances to the tune of 200 million users per month; supposedly, the new integration is intended to filter those queries through a slightly more specific version of the program—informed by work from recently schlorped-up financial startup Hiro—so that they’re not getting financial planning advice from the same meme-brained online “brain” they exchange erotic Spider-Man roleplay messages with. (This is also part of the reasoning behind the company’s push to get you to hand it your private medical records, which it recently branded as “ChatGPT Health.”) The financial option is currently being offered to ChatGPT’s Pro users—whose willingness to pay the service’s $100 per month price tag does suggest they might need some fiscal saving from themselves—and connects bank accounts via financial connection service Plaid, which, fun story, paid out $58 million in a class action settlement in 2021 over claims that it was being irresponsible with how it collected users’ data.
The question here, obviously, isn’t “Should you do this,” because the answer there is so very clearly “No, you guileless sap.” The question is whether giving your bank account information to a robot programmed by feckless, aggressively profit-seeking billionaires is such a bad idea that you deserve what happens to you when it all goes wrong—data breaches, identity theft, just plain bad advice, take your pick—or whether people should be forgiven for letting themselves be guided by a massive, well-funded propaganda machine into believing that the digital yes man who lives in their phones knows better than they do about the state of their own lives. We’re inclined to the latter position, but, hell, don’t ask us: ChatGPT presumably has a perfectly valid opinion, too.
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