Are We Ready for AI-Generated Code?

In recent months, we've marveled at the quality of computer-generated faces, cat pictures, videos, essays, and even art. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have also quietly slipped into software development, with tools like GitHub Copilot, Tabnine, Polycode, and others taking the logical next step of putting existing code autocomplete functionality on AI steroids. Unlike cat pics, though, the origin, quality, and security of application code can have wide-reaching implications -- and at least for security, research shows that the risk is real. Prior academic research has already shown that GitHub Copilot often generates code with security vulnerabilities. More recently, hands-on analysis from Invicti security engineer Kadir Arslan showed that insecure code suggestions are still the rule rather than the exception with Copilot.