Microsoft may have committed to reducing microslop in Windows 11, but the tech giant seemingly forgot to CC GitHub about the initiative. A software developer named Zach Manson shared that Copilot injected an ad into a pull request on GitHub.
According to Manson, one of their team members used Copilot to correct a typo in a pull request. Copilot did fix the typo, but it also added an ad for Copilot and Raycast in the pull request description.
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An investigation by Neowin sheds light on what likely caused the text to appear. While the message mentions Raycast by name, it appears Copilot is the tool injecting the text.
Searching for the phrase that appeared in Manson’s pull request shows over 11,000 instances of the same text in pull requests on GitHub.
The markdown of pages with that text include the phrase, “START COPILOT CODING AGENT TIPS.” It appears Copilot is adding “tips” to pull requests that promote the AI tool.
There is also a chance that Raycast is the culprit here. Raycast has a Copilot extension which could inject text promoting Raycast and Copilot.
I’ve reached out to Microsoft for a comment on this topic and will update this piece as more information becomes available.
GitHub’s controversial connection to AI
The Microsoft-owned GitHub is connected to AI in several ways, some of which are genuinely useful. GitHub Copilot can improve productivity, help find bugs, and streamline the development process.
But the tool was trained partly on code hosted in GitHub, which upset some users. Microsoft has updated its GitHub Copilot usage policy to specify that inputs, outputs, code snippets, and associated context in GitHub will be used to train Microsoft’s AI models.
That change will affect Copilot Free, Pro, and Pro+ users (business and enterprise users are unaffected).
There is an option to opt out of having GitHub data train Microsoft’s models.
Ironically, if Copilot injects ads into pull requests and then GitHub data is used to train Microsoft’s AI models, we’ll see AI being trained on AI.
That loop can be dangerous. In the early days of Google Bard and Bing Chat, the AI tools made it look like I shared fake news by listing my article as a source, despite the fact my report claimed the exact opposite of what the AI tools claimed.
If AI feeds AI, drift can occur. Without proper grounding, mistakes can perpetuate and shift into further error.
Maybe we’ll see a future in which AI promotes ads by accident after it has been trained on code samples that include injected ads.
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