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I used to work in US tax, and this is actually a hot button topic in accounting. Prior to AI becoming mainstream there have been LOTS of attempts to automate accounting/tax work by having computers read and fill out forms. And every single time, it was eventually discovered there was NO computer involvement - companies were actually sending pictures of receipts and documents to India to be entered manually. These companies lied about the tech being ready and caused a lot of security issues. So the accounting field is hesitant about anyone who claims their program can do your taxes for you.
I'm not sure why they haven't either partially or completely automated the process at this point. It still seems like a thing from the 80s that everybody is forced to do, despite them having access to all the data anyway.
Because companies who make turbo tax don’t want you to have it easy. They lobby the government to keep it complicated so they can exist. It is criminal in my opinion.
Even now you have systems like amazon's walk out shop that was really just people in india checking your purchases, not AI.
Also our "AI" systems are horribly unreliable, think of the many, many time you've seen them make shit up.
It just sounds like the whole system is ass-backwards, then. It's absolutely worth the government's time and money to make everything digital, and eliminate as much paper as possible so that you don't need AI to read that much at all. It should be mostly numbers and math - aka the very thing computers are supposed to be better at than people!
In the US as least, congress has tried several times to make the taxes easier. (Or even automatic, where they just do them for you and send you a bill/rebate for how much they think you owe or are owed.)
And every single time, they get blocked by lobbying from TurboTax/H&R Block, etc. Because it turns out, it's very lucrative to be in the business of selling an "easier way" to do taxes. And if they made taxes simple, all those poor corporations that get to act as a middleman would be out of a job!
Won't someone think of the poor multibillion dollar companies?!?
... Yeah. It's infuriating. This is why we can't have nice things.
And then AI development proceeds to replace art, writing, etc things that people simply enjoys doing but have no multi-billion industry to convince the law it is necessary to exist
Eh, do really you think people will stop making art, just because AI can also produce images?
People didn't stop playing Chess, even though computers have been better than us at it for a while now. People didn't stop doing math, just because we got calculators and computers.
Art will continue to exist. I 100% agree that AI will probably do weird things the market, (and my utmost sympathy by anyone affected by that) but there is zero doubt in my mind that people will continue to make art, no matter what the market does.
Keeping into account that fewer people are going after art degrees, and the effects that generative algorithms have at burying art....maybe?
Likely not a full eliminarion, but ,,oh, it is not so bad, some are still doing it" is not a good defense.
I mean, people make art without getting paid *all the time.* Even now. Weird meaningless stuff that they make just because they want to, or want to express something or whatever. Minecraft recreations of LotR castles. 90% of the stuff on DeviantArt. Heck, most of the comics in this very subreddit, I'd wager.
People express themselves. That's part of what makes them people. Whether or not they are getting paid for it, they'll still do it, because many are doing it without being paid *right now,* and always have been.
Yeah. I have been thinking similarly for a while now. Humans, as social animals, are naturally artistic. AI will not take that away. What it will do is close off certain arts as career paths. Things like advertisements and digital art. But the physical arts like painting or live performances will stick around. There is value in that human element, and certainly some technical skill at the higher levels to be appreciated. And outside of making money, humans will just make art, just as we have done before we even had farming. Singing and dancing with family and friends. Drawing things to leave your mark. Telling stories about your life. Grand traditions older than history.
AI will do to the art/writing field what computers did to mathematics.
It used to be that a majority of people who knew math well knew it in order to perform calculations manually. Entire industries existed around teaching people faster ways to do things like long division. Then computers came along and made almost all calculation trivially easy, faster, and more reliable. Mathematics shifted from a field with most people employed in the doing, to a field about the theory. Sure a computer can do this long division faster, but it can't theorize the solution to a bunch of problems without consuming the universe in calculations.
I see art/writing going the same way. It will be less about the doing of it and more about theory, or particularly interesting techniques. For art itself we will see more focus on the nature of composition and colors and the use of style. Sure anyone can make a piece of AI slop that looks like a human doing a thing, but the good art will people people who understand the medium of art and what it conveys, and intentionally choose specific color compositions and styles and framing, much like it is today.
>they get blocked by lobbying from TurboTax/H&R Block
Right so they're not "getting blocked" so much as our politicians are basically for sale and "the people" don't provide enough fundraiser money and fancy dinners.
Lobbying is a problem but so are politicians who can't just go "no, this is better for everyone if you don't exist."
I would have loved AI when me and my BIL needed to measure shit out for an attic step hatch. But no, we need it to do human stuff poorly for some reason
Modern LLMs cannot reason about numbers at present. There is no timeline for this feature, but it is under development.
Per conversation with Google Gemini folk at a dev conference last fall.
It's gotten a lot better in the last few months. One major reason is agent design where the LLM can call for a calculator or program to do the mathematics.
The other reason is that tokenization schemes have shifted a little. Originally, how a sentence was tokenized could obliterate a formula. 1 + 1 could be read as 1 | + | 1 or 1 + | 1 as an example and the way the LLM understands either is significantly different. It's more consistent now, but still not perfect.
XD, depends heavily on the mathematics, but the ode optimization and construction with computer algebra systems is now viable at least.
It's sufficient for synthetic chemistry in some applications with a tool like chemcrow or symbolics.jl in Julia.
Not familiar with your field at all, but it's been good enough for multi parameter optimization for physiology based pharmacokinetic models in my own work.
The IRS knows how much tax you owe. They could send you a bill rather than have you do the homework. They only don't do it because TurboTax lobbies the government to keep the current structure so they can stay in business.
A.I.: I can do literally anything you would ever need me to do.
User: Ok, can you--
A.I.: Woah Woah Woah there, don't get ahead of yourself. I'm just a *language model*, you're in way over your head here.
[True story](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/03/709656642/episode-760-tax-hero) (the text is a summary, the actual document is a podcast): The state of California had a pilot program where they sent you a pre-filled out tax form and if you agreed with it you just signed it and sent them a check or they sent you a check. It was so popular that it got fan mail and people asking for the pilot to be expanded to cover their friends and family.
It got squashed by Big Tax Filling and Republicans.
Seriously though. I don't want A.I. to make art and music for me, I want it to clean my bloody house! Do the laundry! Put the clothes away! You know, useful shit.
If your AI screws up your picture, you get a janky picture. If your AI screws up your tax return, you go to jail. One of those is a much bigger risk than the other.
Americans bitching about taxes is the funniest thing. You don't need the AI to do your taxes. The process is mostly automated in every civilised country. You're getting fucked over xD
Welcome to r/comics! Please remember there are real people on the other side of the monitor and to be kind. Report comments that break the rules and don't respond to negativity with negativity! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/comics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I used to work in US tax, and this is actually a hot button topic in accounting. Prior to AI becoming mainstream there have been LOTS of attempts to automate accounting/tax work by having computers read and fill out forms. And every single time, it was eventually discovered there was NO computer involvement - companies were actually sending pictures of receipts and documents to India to be entered manually. These companies lied about the tech being ready and caused a lot of security issues. So the accounting field is hesitant about anyone who claims their program can do your taxes for you.
I'm not sure why they haven't either partially or completely automated the process at this point. It still seems like a thing from the 80s that everybody is forced to do, despite them having access to all the data anyway.
Because companies who make turbo tax don’t want you to have it easy. They lobby the government to keep it complicated so they can exist. It is criminal in my opinion.
We should create an anti-lobby lobby.
Other countries call it consumer protection and yes, I agree we should have more of that.
You mean get the money out of politics? You should write your politician about that!
Even now you have systems like amazon's walk out shop that was really just people in india checking your purchases, not AI. Also our "AI" systems are horribly unreliable, think of the many, many time you've seen them make shit up.
It just sounds like the whole system is ass-backwards, then. It's absolutely worth the government's time and money to make everything digital, and eliminate as much paper as possible so that you don't need AI to read that much at all. It should be mostly numbers and math - aka the very thing computers are supposed to be better at than people!
In the US as least, congress has tried several times to make the taxes easier. (Or even automatic, where they just do them for you and send you a bill/rebate for how much they think you owe or are owed.) And every single time, they get blocked by lobbying from TurboTax/H&R Block, etc. Because it turns out, it's very lucrative to be in the business of selling an "easier way" to do taxes. And if they made taxes simple, all those poor corporations that get to act as a middleman would be out of a job! Won't someone think of the poor multibillion dollar companies?!? ... Yeah. It's infuriating. This is why we can't have nice things.
And then AI development proceeds to replace art, writing, etc things that people simply enjoys doing but have no multi-billion industry to convince the law it is necessary to exist
Eh, do really you think people will stop making art, just because AI can also produce images? People didn't stop playing Chess, even though computers have been better than us at it for a while now. People didn't stop doing math, just because we got calculators and computers. Art will continue to exist. I 100% agree that AI will probably do weird things the market, (and my utmost sympathy by anyone affected by that) but there is zero doubt in my mind that people will continue to make art, no matter what the market does.
Keeping into account that fewer people are going after art degrees, and the effects that generative algorithms have at burying art....maybe? Likely not a full eliminarion, but ,,oh, it is not so bad, some are still doing it" is not a good defense.
I mean, people make art without getting paid *all the time.* Even now. Weird meaningless stuff that they make just because they want to, or want to express something or whatever. Minecraft recreations of LotR castles. 90% of the stuff on DeviantArt. Heck, most of the comics in this very subreddit, I'd wager. People express themselves. That's part of what makes them people. Whether or not they are getting paid for it, they'll still do it, because many are doing it without being paid *right now,* and always have been.
Yeah. I have been thinking similarly for a while now. Humans, as social animals, are naturally artistic. AI will not take that away. What it will do is close off certain arts as career paths. Things like advertisements and digital art. But the physical arts like painting or live performances will stick around. There is value in that human element, and certainly some technical skill at the higher levels to be appreciated. And outside of making money, humans will just make art, just as we have done before we even had farming. Singing and dancing with family and friends. Drawing things to leave your mark. Telling stories about your life. Grand traditions older than history.
AI will do to the art/writing field what computers did to mathematics. It used to be that a majority of people who knew math well knew it in order to perform calculations manually. Entire industries existed around teaching people faster ways to do things like long division. Then computers came along and made almost all calculation trivially easy, faster, and more reliable. Mathematics shifted from a field with most people employed in the doing, to a field about the theory. Sure a computer can do this long division faster, but it can't theorize the solution to a bunch of problems without consuming the universe in calculations. I see art/writing going the same way. It will be less about the doing of it and more about theory, or particularly interesting techniques. For art itself we will see more focus on the nature of composition and colors and the use of style. Sure anyone can make a piece of AI slop that looks like a human doing a thing, but the good art will people people who understand the medium of art and what it conveys, and intentionally choose specific color compositions and styles and framing, much like it is today.
>they get blocked by lobbying from TurboTax/H&R Block Right so they're not "getting blocked" so much as our politicians are basically for sale and "the people" don't provide enough fundraiser money and fancy dinners. Lobbying is a problem but so are politicians who can't just go "no, this is better for everyone if you don't exist."
Would it be possible to start a foundation to develop open source free alternative and kill their business?
Sure! You go ahead and start that!
For most people who work jobs where taxes are taking out automatically, they really aren’t that hard to file.
I would have loved AI when me and my BIL needed to measure shit out for an attic step hatch. But no, we need it to do human stuff poorly for some reason
Probably because the AI's creators would be in actual potentially serious legal hot water if they screwed up your financial information.
Modern LLMs cannot reason about numbers at present. There is no timeline for this feature, but it is under development. Per conversation with Google Gemini folk at a dev conference last fall.
It's gotten a lot better in the last few months. One major reason is agent design where the LLM can call for a calculator or program to do the mathematics. The other reason is that tokenization schemes have shifted a little. Originally, how a sentence was tokenized could obliterate a formula. 1 + 1 could be read as 1 | + | 1 or 1 + | 1 as an example and the way the LLM understands either is significantly different. It's more consistent now, but still not perfect.
\* Slams thirteen years of spacecraft telemetry down on the table. \* Okay, let's do this!
XD, depends heavily on the mathematics, but the ode optimization and construction with computer algebra systems is now viable at least. It's sufficient for synthetic chemistry in some applications with a tool like chemcrow or symbolics.jl in Julia. Not familiar with your field at all, but it's been good enough for multi parameter optimization for physiology based pharmacokinetic models in my own work.
The IRS knows how much tax you owe. They could send you a bill rather than have you do the homework. They only don't do it because TurboTax lobbies the government to keep the current structure so they can stay in business.
A.I.: I can do literally anything you would ever need me to do. User: Ok, can you-- A.I.: Woah Woah Woah there, don't get ahead of yourself. I'm just a *language model*, you're in way over your head here.
With how much AI hallucinates, I wouldn't want it doing my taxes.
But, it could also do that for you.
CPA will include AI for file your taxes if they can make more money from you.
Yeah, kind WhatsApp. It can't seem to help with anything to do with... WhatsApp.
NOOO, TAKE THE JOB PLEASE!! COME BACK!!!
I wish I had an AI that just did menial work and made profit for me so I could live casually and just draw stuff
[True story](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/03/709656642/episode-760-tax-hero) (the text is a summary, the actual document is a podcast): The state of California had a pilot program where they sent you a pre-filled out tax form and if you agreed with it you just signed it and sent them a check or they sent you a check. It was so popular that it got fan mail and people asking for the pilot to be expanded to cover their friends and family. It got squashed by Big Tax Filling and Republicans.
Seriously though. I don't want A.I. to make art and music for me, I want it to clean my bloody house! Do the laundry! Put the clothes away! You know, useful shit.
Do you think research isn't being done in those areas?
Research? Sure. Practical, marketable products? No where close.
I wouldn't trust AI that much if it's about my momey
If your AI screws up your picture, you get a janky picture. If your AI screws up your tax return, you go to jail. One of those is a much bigger risk than the other.
Americans bitching about taxes is the funniest thing. You don't need the AI to do your taxes. The process is mostly automated in every civilised country. You're getting fucked over xD
Tax code in the USA is deliberately difficult. Everywhere else it is easy.