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Copilot edited an ad into my PR

notes.zachmanson.com

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Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#331

Post by ncr100 »

shimman wrote: post #289
tyleo wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious how the decision to include ads like this was made. Is that something you can share?

[flagged]

MS was deemed a Monopoly I believe around '99 and was not broken up, was instead given behavioral edicts by the court.

Microsoft owns GitHub where many of these ethical violations are easily found and were perpetrated.

I speculate the cultural safety around that monopoly-power for corporate-benefit behavior could still be present and accepted for negotiations between MS and acquisition targets.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#333

Post by probably_wrong »

ben_w wrote: post #310
probably_wrong wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Plagiarism applies to people, not tools.

Everyone who studies linguistics will tell you the rules of language are descriptive not proscriptive. This means that people saying "plagiarism" of an LLM, means that LLMs are necessarily in the set of things that can do plagiarism, regardless of if those same people would ever say this about a spanner. And you can also think about it a different way: a book is a tool for storing and distributing information, photoc…

I don't think your example works because in the book case there's a clear author whose ideas are being reproduced without permission. The LLM in your example is not the author but rather the printing press, and no one would argue that the printing press' ideas are being stolen because the press doesn't have any.

If one want to argue that "not citing the LLM would be plagiarism" then we would have to find the human at the end of the chain whose ideas are being reproduced, which would require LLMs to output "this idea was seen in the following training documents".

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#334

Post by ncr100 »

martinwoodward wrote: post #275
buildbot wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

We are not training on the contents of private repos, but we do plan on training on usage data with Copilot unless you opt out before April 24. Details here: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/updates-to-gi... That post has a link to the FAQ which might also be helpful: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/188488

This too is creepy.

The behavioral impositions by the court in the United States versus Microsoft trial discourage it from Monopoly behavior by opening third-party apis to competitors.

Q: Will Microsoft share its access to users private repos where they have not opted out of this training via its GitHub subsidiary, with third parties (eg OpenAI and Anthropic), in the spirit of its loss to the United States during its trial for Monopoly behavior?

Eg ethically today, Microsoft may be able to be argued to be monopolizing user data for its own AI tooling advantage.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#335

Post by NateEag »

neya wrote: post #225
heavyset_go wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Microsoft is willing to put ads into your PRs via Copilot like this, imagine what they could put into your codebase itself with Copilot. Or what Microsoft could do, run, install, etc on/from your computer while running their Copilot agents. This is the same company that puts ads in your start menu and reinserts them with Windows updates even if you manually removed them.

Imagine just having the copilot extension installed will be an excuse at some point for them to steal our code to train their AI models. Not sure if they already do this.

Of course they already do this.

The ToS (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot/for-indivi...) says explicitly:

> Copilot may include both automated and manual (human) processing of data. You shouldn’t share any information with Copilot that you don’t want us to review.

so they're reserving the right to process whatever it looks at.

You're sending them your codebase already, as part of the prompt for generating new snippets, debugging, etc. So they have access to it.

They'd be absolute fools not to be using the results of sessions to continue to refine their models, and they already reserved the rights to look at what you send them, so yeah - they're doing it.

(Bonus comedy from the ToS:

> Copilot is for entertainment purposes only.

The lawyers know these things cannot be trusted.)

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#336

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

BloondAndDoom wrote: post #311
delfinom wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should probably get a lawyer to send a C&D.

I hear you, but honestly it’s kind of funny to think a company would send C&D to stop free advertising for them. I’d be surprising to see if any company ever does that, whatever the people think small brands worth they actually worth way less than that.

Is it free advertising or free brand damage? (people might think that raycast had consented to this)

but as we know from this thread, Raycast didn't consent to this.

It might be interesting to see what a lawyer might think of this and if there are enough reasonable claims to genuinely sue for damages

(Raycast definitely seek a lawyer privately, just in case)

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#337

Post by mvkel »

anton-g wrote: post #55

Well, you are not alone: https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+cop...

What an absolute mess. It's like some dystopian future where a man is laying in a casket, nearly dead, and on the casket's ceiling, inches from his face, is a screen with an ad blaring to drink more Diet Fanta.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#339

Post by boplicity »

You have to think about the security implications of this.

How many people had any idea this was happening? Very few, I suspect.

A malicious actor could take control of a model provider, and then use it to inject code into many, many different repos. This could lead to very bad things.

One more reason that consolidated control of AI technology is not good.

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