AI-generated content is everywhere. It writes product descriptions, customer service emails, social media posts, and news summaries. According to a study by the SEO firm Graphite, more than half of new English-language articles online are now primarily written by AI.
Financial advice is no exception. (We actually tested GPT for investing advice a few years ago.) The concern isn’t whether your advisor uses AI. It’s whether AI is doing the thinking. If your advisor’s content reads like it was written by the same machine that drafts everyone else’s, you should wonder what else has been outsourced?
Here are the telltale signs:
1) Fake terminology
AI compensates for a lack of genuine insight by manufacturing the appearance of one. It invents authoritative-sounding labels for concepts that don’t have established names. These phrases sound like they come from a textbook or a research paper. They don’t. AI made them up. Some examples:
- “The Diversification Trap”
- “The Comfort Zone Effect”
- “The Three Pillars of Wealth Resilience”
- “The Compounding Mindset”
- “The Liquidity Paradox”
- “The Rule of 3x”
- “The Preservation Priority”
Real financial concepts earn their names Consider the Efficient Market Hypothesis, Modern Portfolio Theory, or the Sharpe Ratio. These exist because practitioners and academics developed them over decades of research and debate. If your advisor’s latest newsletter introduces a term you can’t find mentioned anywhere else, it probably didn’t exist before the prompt.
2) Cliché phrases
AI language models have verbal tics. They reach for the same filler phrases the way a nervous public speaker says “um.” Once you learn to recognize them, you’ll see them everywhere:
- “In today’s rapidly evolving landscape”
- “Whether you’re a seasoned investor or just starting out”
- “Let’s dive in” and “Let’s break it down”
- “Navigate”
- “It’s important to remember that…”
- “Game-changer”
- “Unlock value” and “unlock potential”
- “In an era of”
Any one of these in isolation is harmless. A newsletter that chains several together in every paragraph is telling you something about who, or what, wrote it.
3) Overused nautical metaphors
AI loves to write about “steering” portfolios, “weathering storms,” “staying the course,” and “anchoring” expectations. It reaches for them because they’re in the training data, not because they are particularly meaningful.
We are admittedly conflicted here. Our team members are sailing enthusiasts, and we think racing sailboats is one of the richest metaphors for investing that exists. It’s a complex comparison that deserves its own article. AI, on the other hand, just uses small phrases that sound good in a financial context. Just for fun, we compiled a more comprehensive list of nautical phrases often used in finance.
4) Lack of an opinion
AI is trained to be balanced. It hedges by default. When you ask it about almost any financial topic, it will present both sides, acknowledge trade-offs, and carefully avoid committing to a position. The result reads like this: “While value investing has historically rewarded patient investors, growth strategies can also offer compelling returns in the right environment. Each approach has its merits, and the best choice depends on your individual circumstances.”
That sentence says absolutely nothing. It’s the financial equivalent of answering “What’s your favorite restaurant?” with “There are many good restaurants, and the best one depends on what you’re in the mood for.”
You’re paying your advisor for judgment. A good advisor has investment opinions and can articulate why they hold them. They favor certain approaches over others. They have views on specific sectors, or specific companies, or current market conditions that they can defend with reasoning. If every piece of communication from your advisor reads like a Wikipedia article, that’s a red flag.
5) Generic advice
Related to the hedging problem is the substance problem. AI-generated financial content gravitates toward advice so generic it could apply to any person in any situation. “Diversify your portfolio.” “Maintain an emergency fund.” “Stay the course during market downturns.” These are fine as general financial literacy, but they aren’t advice. They’re principles repeated so often they’ve lost all meaning. And they certainly aren’t what you’re paying an advisory fee for.
Real advisory value comes from specificity. A good advisor has a defined investment philosophy. They can tell you why they prefer certain types of investments over others, point to specific decisions they’ve made, and explain the reasoning. If your advisor’s content never mentions specific companies, sectors, or current economic conditions, and never expresses a view that someone might disagree with, it’s probably not coming from a human with conviction.
6) Em dashes and other punctuation
AI-generated writing loves em dashes. It uses them constantly to insert asides, create dramatic pauses, and break up sentences in ways that feel performative. It also overuses colons to introduce lists, definitions, and explanations, sometimes multiple times in a single paragraph.
Beyond punctuation, look at the structure. AI-generated articles tend to have paragraphs of nearly identical length. Every section follows the same pattern. Headers are grammatically parallel in a way that feels manufactured. The whole piece has a suspicious tidiness, like a house staged for an open house rather than one that’s actually lived in.
None of these are damning on their own. But if a piece of content has uniform paragraph lengths, parallel headers, liberal em dashes, and colons introducing every other sentence, you’re probably not reading something written from scratch by a person with opinions.
Why over-relying on AI should worry you
AI assisted content is cosmetic. The real danger is what happens to the investment process.
Writing forces an advisor to organize their thoughts, defend their positions, and commit to a point of view. That’s true whether it’s market commentary, a client email, or an advertisement. When AI does the writing, that intellectual process gets skipped. And if AI is doing the thinking on communications, it’s worth asking whether it’s influencing the investment process too. An advisor whose published views are generic and AI-generated may be running an equally generic portfolio.
AI generates text with confidence regardless of whether the underlying claims are accurate. Hundreds of court filings in the United States have now contained fabricated citations generated by AI, including cases where lawyers were sanctioned for submitting entirely fictitious legal authorities. The AI didn’t flag these as uncertain. It presented them as fact. Now imagine that same confidence applied to a tax strategy, a historical market claim, or a retirement projection. An advisor who doesn’t rigorously verify AI output is exposing clients to errors that sound authoritative but aren’t real.
An advisor who relies on AI for their thinking will eventually stop having opinions worth paying for.
What responsible AI use looks like
None of this means your advisor should avoid AI entirely. That would be unrealistic.
Many registered investment advisors are now incorporating AI policies into their compliance manuals, a trend the SEC has recognized in its 2026 examination priorities. These policies typically cover uses like meeting transcription, research assistance, and drafting support. The key element is mandatory human review. AI can accelerate certain tasks, but a qualified person needs to check the output before it reaches clients.
When AI is used responsibly, with genuine editing, fact-checking, and original thought, it doesn’t actually save as much time as you’d expect. The thinking still takes real effort. That’s the point. It means the advisor is still doing their job.
The question isn’t whether your advisor uses AI. Almost everyone does at this point, in some form. The question is whether your advisor is still doing the thinking.
Want to make sure a human is behind your financial plan? It starts with just four questions.
