~nJan 4, 2024

This is fine...
"We observed that participants who had access to the AI assistant were more likely to introduce security vulnerabilities for the majority of programming tasks, yet were also more likely to rate their insecure answers as secure compared to those in our control group."

https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.03622

Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?

We conduct the first large-scale user study examining how users interact with an AI Code assistant to solve a variety of security related tasks across different programming languages. Overall, we find that participants who had access to an AI assistant based on OpenAI's codex-davinci-002 model wrote significantly less secure code than those without access. Additionally, participants with access to an AI assistant were more likely to believe they wrote secure code than those without access to the AI assistant. Furthermore, we find that participants who trusted the AI less and engaged more with the language and format of their prompts (e.g. re-phrasing, adjusting temperature) provided code with fewer security vulnerabilities. Finally, in order to better inform the design of future AI-based Code assistants, we provide an in-depth analysis of participants' language and interaction behavior, as well as release our user interface as an instrument to conduct similar studies in the future.

arXiv.org
Show threadMagister Endomain

@nblr Reading the methodology, I think what this study shows is that these chat interfaces are not really ready to be web searches yet.

Bot control and experiment groups had access to external web browsers. They didn't seem to track the variable use, but noted many people used the browser.

It's pretty interesting! Thanks for sharing!

Some spare thoughts: I wonder if Google's new entry would have done better here given that their integration is noticeably better at integrating their own search results, which are still industry leading despite the decay of the interface as a whole due to ad placement.

Also, I wonder if folks realize what a truly difficult challenge prompt engineering is for code generation. My experience with these tools is that unless there is a big codebase already there with examples of the security posture expected, it's brutally difficult to get the LLM to keep consistent on security postures.

Jan 4, 2024 at 8:51pmWeb