NEW YORK—One community thinks so-called AI hallucinations are actually a good thing: hackers, according to a new report.
AI “hallucinations,” which are statements and “facts” the AI make up, are one of the problematic challenges facing the adoption of the technology by credit unions and other organizations.
“Especially when developers use AI tools that hallucinate entire software libraries, threat actors can ensure those libraries come into existence - with extra malicious functions,” Bank Info Security said.
The report added, “One security researcher probing AI-hallucinated libraries said…he found chat bots calling for a nonexistent Python package dubbed ‘huggingface-cli.’ Bar Lanyado of Lasso Security uploaded an empty package with that name, wondering what would happen. The result? More than 35,000 authentic downloads in three months, he told Information Security Media Group.
Coding Tools
AI coding tools including ChatGPT are popular among programmers to help automate tasks, understand code logic, identify errors and even assist with writing the code itself, Bank Info Security noted.
“The results of a summer 2023 GitHub programmer survey show that ‘92% of U.S.-based developers are already using AI coding tools both in and outside of work,’ and 70% of them say that AI provides, ‘significant benefits’ to their code.
"Many times when users get a code example or a recommendation for a package from these tools they trust them and copy paste many times without checking the answers," Lanyado said.
A ‘Surprise’
Several large companies used or recommended the fake package in their repositories, including Alibaba, Lanyado said.
Lanyado said he predicted something like this would happen, but the scale of adoption and its integration into the development environments of known enterprises surprised him, Bank Info Security said.
"Following my previous research, l anticipated that OpenAI and similar models would address the challenge of hallucinated answers, yet this research unequivocally reveals they did not," he said.
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