Wall Street weighs pros and cons of AI as Washington gets to work

investmentnews.com:

Washington is sprinting to keep pace with the AI revolution. So where does that leave Wall Street?

Adobe, IBM, Nvidia and a handful more technology companies signed President Joe Biden’s voluntary commitments governing artificial intelligence this week. The document requires steps such as watermarking AI-generated content and other assurances aimed at limiting AI to positive purposes, as opposed to nefarious ones.

AI industry juggernauts Google, OpenAI and OpenAI partner Microsoft signed onto the original set of commitments in July. The other five companies signing on to the commitments this week were Palantir, Stability, Salesforce, Scale and Cohere.

The White House’s maneuver is a step forward in legislating the growth of AI and its purveyors. All the President’s men and women apparently felt the need to make some kind of move, even a barely binding one. Meanwhile, a Senate subcommittee is meeting this week to discuss the dangers involving the lack of AI transparency, even as it struggles to pass any sort of practical AI legislation.

So with no real laws on the books to guide them and a new technological transformation in the air, what is the wealth management industry doing to maximize the positives of AI, while protecting clients from its potentially destructive purposes?

THE GOOD SIDE OF AI…

According to most wealth advisors, AI is best used for marketing and organizational tasks in its current configuration. Sure there are so-called Quant traders out there using advanced algorithms to pick stocks and move markets, but for the majority of wealth managers AI is more about writing letters than crunching numbers at this juncture.

Michael Whitman, financial planner at Millennium Planning Group, for example, says the