(Bloomberg Opinion) — The extraordinary hype around artificial intelligence this year touched the finance industry, too, but most banks have been rightly cautious about jumping directly onto the bandwagon. In such a tightly regulated business, the costs of getting it wrong could be extreme.
Several big banks started the year by banning employees from experimenting with ChatGPT in their day jobs. They were concerned about the factual errors, “hallucinations” and risks of plagiarism inherent to the public version of the text-generation tool. Behind the scenes however, the same lenders have been scrambling for tech talent, while exploring how they might use generative AI and what it could do better than the predictive AI, or machine learning, tools used for years in fraud detection and anti-money laundering work.