• Nycifer@piefed.social
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    3 hours ago

    And another on a list of things you should not use AI for…

    AI is not for:

    • Therapy
    • Tax Filing
    • Planning Revenge
    • Trying to make you win online arguments
    • Trying to make it see things your way, like specific worldviews
    • Trying to make it orchestrate protests
    • Erotic Roleplay (Grok doesn’t care about it though)
    • Stalk people
  • jj4211@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    Hey LLM. I’m thinking of deducting my Corvette as a business expense for my landscaping business, is that a good idea?

    What a creative way to lower your tax burden! This totally makes sense and you can be confident that your decision will be well received.

    (Others can take the LLM tone better than me, and I don’t have the patience for LLM verbosity).

  • jj4211@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    I wonder if I counted…

    So I did the tax prep using a free offer from TurboTax. Everything seemed traditional.

    Then, at the end it generated an AI summary of my return. I didn’t have a choice, it just did it. I have the “unhelpful” feedback because:

    • Despite saying it was “explaining” the numbers and why, all it did was just list the numbers from the fairly straightforward table right above the AI response in a more awkward form, not explaining anything.
    • Further, despite the seemingly easy task of “Take a table of figures and repeat them in prose”, it still screwed up and messed up and of the figures that all our had to do was repeat verbatim.

    So AI was forced into my tax prep and did nothing substantive (thank goodness) and flubbed the cosmetic role it tried to play.

  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    4 hours ago

    So if we do this, and the AI fucks up, can we just blame the AI and not get in trouble? Isn’t that why it exists?

        • DrPop@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          I know where you are coming from, but i can assure you the people who are being audited are being audited for a reason. Either it’s claiming false dependents or credits they are not entitled to. I’ve seen people try to claim a $50000 refund but there income is only $5000. What happens is these people go to some random person on the street who says they can get them a bigger refund and they don’t question it.

      • pdxfed@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        There are like 100 for the whole country. No one gets audited, statistically speaking. It’s why you’ve never learned anything about taxes from your parents or friends. They don’t know either. People pay people at HR block who don’t know about taxes either to file. No one gets in trouble because the only people who know tax laws work for the very wealthy. Or at the IRS where there are about 100 of them to 300m of us.

    • MyBrainHurts@piefed.ca
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      14 hours ago

      The top ways people plan to use AI is to help answer filing questions, find deductions or credits, and review returns for mistakes.

      If you can’t afford a professional, these don’t seem particularly unreasonable. I certain wouldn’t recommend feeding all your info into chatgpt etc but for a simple filer, asking an LLM for explanations or possible deductions seems fine.

      Not everyone has access to the same resources that I do, so I try to picture it from others perspectives.

  • mermella@piefed.social
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    14 hours ago

    Why are we filing and paying taxes anymore? They’ve stripped most things that help the common citizen including things like the SEC that allow the president to pump a stock ticker

    • GooseFinger@sh.itjust.works
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      13 hours ago

      Because my employer garnished my wages to pay taxes, and if I dont file my taxes, the federal will keep my refund.

  • MyBrainHurts@piefed.ca
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    15 hours ago

    I mean, a lot of tax stuff is automated. Mine are pretty straightforward so turboTax handles a huge chunk of the work…

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      4 hours ago

      Most people take the standard deduction, and for us, it’s usually as easy as copying a few numbers from the boxes on a W-2 form into a website.

      However, for some people/jobs it makes more sense to do itemized deductions, in which case, it gets more complicated.

      That said, using an LLM for it is fucking stupid

      • MyBrainHurts@piefed.ca
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        15 hours ago

        Neither the article, nor source make a distinction as to whether it’s a general purpose LLM or purpose built software.

        So it really depends on the question that the poll asked, which as far as I can tell, is not shared.

        • frongt@lemmy.zip
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          15 hours ago

          Judging by the source, they likely asked “do you plan to use AI”.

          But given that we’re talking about the general public, I guarantee most people using AI for their taxes are just asking chatgpt.

          • MyBrainHurts@piefed.ca
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            15 hours ago

            I don’t know the organization so can’t speak to the source or their methodology but they do note:

            The top ways people plan to use AI is to help answer filing questions, find deductions or credits, and review returns for mistakes.

            All of which seem pretty reasonable. If you don’t have the money for a professional, at least checking with something that is right more often than not with some basic questions seems perfectly reasonable.

            From the reactions above, it seems people are assuming they’re just asking chatgpt to do all their taxes, which doesn’t appear to be the case.

            • Zen_Shinobi@lemmy.world
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              12 hours ago

              Both Turbotax and Taxact have sections for questions on every section while filing, you can even talk to an advisor while filing. Using AI to review or figure out deductions is just being lazy.