CertiK’s Chief Security Officer Talks on AI-coded Smart Contracts

Kang Li, the Chief Security Officer of CertiK, recently shared his opinion on artificial intelligence (AI) tools in a media interview. He said in a recent (September 5, 2023) interview that “AI-based smart contracts may be flawed while it could fail miserably when attacked.” CertiK is a blockchain and smart contract auditing company that keeps updating about smart contract audits, KYC, on-chain monitoring, and more.

How May AI Tools Affect Crypto?

According to Kang Li, any inexperienced programmers who use AI tools such as ChatGPT to write smart contracts may bring problems. It must be noted that ChatGPT is a computer program that uses AI. The ChatGPT-like AI tools will “create more problems, bugs, and attack vectors if used to write smart contracts and build cryptocurrency projects,” remarked CertiK’s Kang Li.

CertiK’s Chief Security Officer explained in the interview that ChatGPT cannot pick up logical code bugs the same way that experienced developers can. He further suggested that ChatGPT may create more bugs than identify them, which could be catastrophic for first-time or amateur coders looking to build their own projects.

The Interview Highlights

During the interview, Kang Li said that “ChatGPT will enable a bunch of people that have never had all this training to jump in, they can start right now and I start to worry about morphological design problems buried in there.”

Li further added, “You write something and ChatGPT helps you build it but because of all these design flaws, it may fail miserably when attackers start coming.” He instead believes ChatGPT should be used as an engineer’s assistant as it’s better at explaining what a line of code actually means.

Li stressed that it should not be relied on for writing code, particularly by those programmers who don’t have experience and are looking to build something monetizable. He said he would back his statements for at least the upcoming years. As he reasoned, the fast developments in AI may vastly improve ChatGPT’s capabilities.

On the other hand, Richard Ma, the co-founder and CEO of Quantstamp, a Web3 security firm, seemed confident about the AI technologies. As he said, “AI tools are becoming more successful at social engineering attacks — many of which are identical to attempts by humans.”

Ma said the clients of his Web3 security firm are reporting an alarming amount of ever more sophisticated social engineering attempts. “[With] the recent ones, it looks like people have been using machine learning to write emails and messages. It’s a lot more convincing than the social engineering attempts from a couple of years ago.” Notably, the regular internet user has been affected by AI-generated spam emails for years.

Andrew is a blockchain developer who developed his interest in cryptocurrencies while his post-graduation. He is a keen observer of details and shares his passion for writing along with being a developer. His backend knowledge about blockchain helps him give a unique perspective to his writing