Money makes the world go round, and financial literacy is the grease that keeps the wheels spinning. From your first penny earned to planning your retirement fund, managing and investing your money is a fundamental part of life for all. Whether it’s large corporate entities or the average joe, everyone can find advice for anything. People look for advice on investing, which credit card to choose, or how to plan a simple budget. With technology constantly changing, people no longer need to get financial advice in-person - they can find what they are looking for with a quick Google search. But how often is the advice given coming from a seasoned financial professional and how often is it generated by AI?
For this study we decided to focus on high-performing pages from high-traffic financial websites (YMYL). We analyzed articles, posts, and guides from various financial websites and used our AI detector, Originality.AI, to examine the review text within the articles to find out how many were suspected to be generated by humans or AI.
-> Finance Management: Personal Finance/Banking/Loans/Credit
-> Information and Education: Guide/Reviews/Advice/Economics
-> Business and Financial Services: Corporate/Small Business/Insurance/Home/Auto
-> Investment and Planning: Investing/Retirement/Taxes
-> Miscellaneous: All other categories
For this portion we only examined the total percentage of articles with an AI Score of 0.5 or higher over the years 2020-2024. In this we notice the following:
CreditKarma,NerdWallet, and ThePointsGuy
InvestorPlace, SmartAsset, and ThePennyHoarder
For this portion we only examined the years of 2021-2024 as no articles from 2020 were included for half of the dataset. The graph above shows the percentage of articles with an AI Score of 0.5 or higher in comparison to the total number of articles per year in each site's dataset.
Note: No articles were collected from the year 2021 for InvestorPlace
In this, we notice the following:
For this portion we only examined rows in which the articles were given an AI Score of 0.5 or higher to best see the distribution of categories of suspected AI Content.
In this we notice the following:
In conclusion, there is a lot of suspected AI being used to assist in or completely write the financial advice we find online. This can be expected as with the growth of technology so comes the growth of artificial intelligence within our daily lives that can impact society both positively and negatively. The importance of AI being or not being used to create the advice is dependent on each individual member of the article's respective audience. To some - it matters, to others - it does not. For those who only want personalized guidance from a human expert, Originality.AI can help empower readers to make informed choices based on their own preferences.
We believe that it is crucial for AI content detectors reported accuracy to be open, transparent, and accountable. The reality is, each person seeking AI-detection services deserves to know which detector is the most accurate for their specific use case.