By Max Yong
Publication Date: 2026-02-16 23:50:00
Max Yong
In one of my personal finance courses at Harvard, I asked students to use AI to answer a simple question: Would you prefer a car loan at 10 percent for one year or 2 percent for 10 years?
Their AI chat tools responded confidently with detailed calculations, claiming “10 percent for a year is always best.” Only one of my forty students realized it was wrong. “I would prefer the 2 percent loan because I could always pay it off in a year,” they correctly pointed out.
If 97.5 percent of my Harvard business students can be fooled by AI, what hope do the rest of us have? It is becoming a popular tool: four in ten Australians use AI for…