Influencers are increasingly providing personal finance advice on social media, including Instagram, TikTok and other platforms. The general public is also increasingly relying on AI to answer their personal finance questions.
Founder and Wealth Advisor of Mitlin Financial Lawrence Sprung joined Robert ‘Bob’ Powell on Deciphering retirement to discuss disinformation in the digital age and whether or not it has become a problem for the general public.
‘Finfluencer’ (decoded)
An “influencer” is a combination of the words “finance” and “influencer.” It describes people who operate social media platforms—like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube—to share tips and information about personal finance, investing, budgeting, and other financial topics.
“When you scroll down and you look at some of these people who are giving advice, you have to be very careful about who you ask,” Sprung said. “We’ve seen over the last few years people who give and take this advice, as you say, and people who follow it, and two weeks later their TikTok account has disappeared, has evaporated because the information they gave was wrong or hurtful to those followers.”
Artificial intelligence
“I recently asked Perplexity AI, ChatGPT, Gemini (GOOG, GOOGLE) personal finance questions, and then have the subject matter expert critique those answers,” Powell said. “And invariably, there are some things that are correct, some things that are incorrect, and then there are serious material omissions. I would never trust AI with a personal finance question right now.”
“I’ve done the same thing, I’ve asked them questions to get blog post topics and things like that, and I’ve noticed a lot of inaccuracies,” Sprung said. “So I think you have to be very careful there as well.”
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Yahoo Finance Deciphering retirement is hosted by Robert Powell and produced by Zach Faulds and Alexander Frangeskides.
Find more episodes of Decoding Retirement on https://finance.yahoo.com/videos/series/decoding-retirement.
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Editor’s Note: This article was written by Zach Faulds.