On his podcast, Clark Howard answers real reader questions on money, credit, debt, retirement, travel, and more, along with co-host Christa DiBiase.

Clark's answer: You don't give AI your account numbers. You can build a portfolio using AI, but you shouldn't treat it as the final decision-maker — use it strictly as a tool. AI works best when it helps you make decisions, not when you abdicate your personal responsibility and blame a bad choice on the technology. No, you use it only as a tool.

I also want to go back to what you said about giving your login credentials to financial institutions. Most modern aggregator technologies — the screen scrapers that pull together a full picture of your finances across multiple firms — no longer store your credentials. That means you're no longer exposed to the risk of a hacker attacking an aggregator's database and gaining the keys to all your accounts, which is a significant and important safety upgrade. Before you use any financial aggregator, you always want to ask: Are they storing my usernames and passwords for my other accounts? If they are, it's simply too risky.

As for the broader privacy concerns of sharing your financial details with AI, if you're just using it to analyze your overall financial picture or help construct a portfolio, I think that's okay to do. However, there are people out there letting AI actively trade stocks for them. I wouldn't do that on a bet.