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Copilot edited an ad into my PR

notes.zachmanson.com

41–50 of 704 posts

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#41

Assuming this isn't a hoax, this seems like a huge, probably unintentional, mistake by MS. If they genuinely implemented something like this, whatever they made from new customers via ads couldn't possibly make up for the loss of good faith with developers and businesses. I suppose if it's real we'll see more reports soon, and maybe a mea culpa.

[deleted]

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#42
post #8

Why is copilot doing this? If they wanted to show ads couldn’t they… just show ads? Or is GitHub such a house of cards at this point that editing pr descriptions is the only way without risking another 9 of downtime?

Are we sure this actually is originating from MS Copilot itself? Technically I believe it would be possible to smuggle ads into PRs using prompt injection too.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#44

Assuming this isn't a hoax, this seems like a huge, probably unintentional, mistake by MS. If they genuinely implemented something like this, whatever they made from new customers via ads couldn't possibly make up for the loss of good faith with developers and businesses. I suppose if it's real we'll see more reports soon, and maybe a mea culpa.

How could you implement something like this by accident ?

LLMs aren't known for being super deterministic.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#46

I think they want the free advertisement, like Apple with its “sent from iPhone” addendums. But “sent from iPhone” is sometimes useful, and significantly shorter. If they just left it at “edited with copilot” I think it would be tolerable

That's exactly where my mind went. It's zero percent more insulting to me than 'sent from my iPhone.'

If you don't want copilot garbage in your PRs, maybe don't use copilot to create or edit them?

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#48
post #11
post #4

Using a LLM to fix a spelling mistake is retardedly lazy. Presumably they used a free version of the LLM, therefore it is completely understandable that it inserted a snippet of text advertising its use into the output. I mean using a free email provider also adds a line of text to the end of every email advertising the service by default - "Sent from iPhone" etc.

Using a LLM to fix a spelling mistake is retardedly lazy. If you do it manually, sure. If you have an agent watching for code changes and automatically opening PRs for small fixes that don't need a human-in-the-loop except for approving the change, it's the opposite of lazy. It eliminately all those tedious 1 point stories and let's the team focus on higher value work that actually needs a person to think about it. G…

Sounds like a great use of energy and tokens, not overkill at all

In fact I don't even use Ctrl + F anymore and instead just use Claude for all my searches

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#49

I think they want the free advertisement, like Apple with its “sent from iPhone” addendums. But “sent from iPhone” is sometimes useful, and significantly shorter. If they just left it at “edited with copilot” I think it would be tolerable

It already does that, too, with the co-author

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#50

Assuming this isn't a hoax, this seems like a huge, probably unintentional, mistake by MS. If they genuinely implemented something like this, whatever they made from new customers via ads couldn't possibly make up for the loss of good faith with developers and businesses. I suppose if it's real we'll see more reports soon, and maybe a mea culpa.

How could you implement something like this by accident ?

One feasible scenario could be that they are working on/experimenting with ads, and it was put behind a feature flag, but for whatever reason it was inadvertently ignored
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