Benefits and dangers of LLM-generated code

Code generated by large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence (AI) engines such as ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot is becoming pervasive and there is a mad dash to incorporate LLMs into everything, especially code-writing tools. And for good reason: it makes developers more productive.

Even if it’s just getting a recommendation of a regular expression to validate an email address, it can be significantly faster than trying to google it and copy it from Stack Overflow or someone’s blog post. If you don’t think it is pervasive, a series of fake book covers that went viral in 2016 included titles such as “Copying and Pasting from Stack Overflow” and “Remembering What to Google.”

Furthermore, the LLM for determining the best answer is based on statistical predictions, not Google’s search algorithm, which can often be gamed or optimized for, letting the page that is most optimized to...