Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?

Understand

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.