  In recent years, large language models have been responsible for great
advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). ChatGPT in particular,
an AI chatbot developed and recently released by OpenAI, has taken the field to
the next level. The conversational model is able not only to process human-like
text, but also to translate natural language into code. However, the safety of
programs generated by ChatGPT should not be overlooked. In this paper, we
perform an experiment to address this issue. Specifically, we ask ChatGPT to
generate a number of program and evaluate the security of the resulting source
code. We further investigate whether ChatGPT can be prodded to improve the
security by appropriate prompts, and discuss the ethical aspects of using AI to
generate code. Results suggest that ChatGPT is aware of potential
vulnerabilities, but nonetheless often generates source code that are not
robust to certain attacks.
