GitHub hits CTRL-Z, decides it will train its AI with user data after all

Microsoft's GitHub next month plans to begin using customer interaction data – "specifically inputs, outputs, code snippets, and associated context" – to train its AI models. The code locker’s revised policy applies to Copilot Free, Pro, and Pro+ customers, as of April 24. Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise users are …

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

Smell that?

That's desperation.

[cyberdemon]

Re: Smell that?

That's enshittification

[ecofeco]

Re: Smell that?

When the shit hits your eye

Like a big shitzza pie

That's enshitification.

No it doesn't ryhme. So sue me . :)

[Jonathan Richards 1]

OT: scansion

The original doesn't rhyme either - 'eye' and 'amore' don't rhyme. What your poetic offering lacks is scansion - 'amore' has three syllables and 'enshitification' about five or six.

Fine sentiment, though: no lawsuits incoming from here.

[Glen 1]

Re: Smell that?

"That's a-more-AI" was right there

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: Smell that?

NO No, thrice NO

Its AI Enshitification

Gert out now. You know it makes sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Smell that?

Having read the GitHub T&C's at the outset I decided to avoid using it the first place and hosted my stuff elsewhere, rather than grant M$ dubious rights over my project source code.

[Ordinary Donkey]

Re: Smell that?

I am happy to say that Github thinks I am named after a Worcestershire village.

No, not that one!

[takno]

Re: Smell that?

Dines Green is fairly normal behaviour for a donkey to be fair

[Enric Martinez]

Re: Smell that?

I use it for my Kitty profiles.

But at work we have 2 gitlab instances, an internal for stuff that needs to run on our clusters and servers and an external one that we mostly use for personal projects.

I have nothing there, so that it will serve me well.

It also annoys me that they call the merge requests "Pull requests".

[QET]

Re: Smell that?

I mean, the whole "AI" debacle is basically the tech sectors desperate hunger for the "next big thing" to grant them more power, and therefore, money, made manifest.

[The Dark Side Of The Mind (TDSOTM)]

Re: Smell that?

That's desperate enshitification.

[cyberdemon]

Re: Smell that?

And er, antitrust. They should never have been allowed to buy GitHub (or LinkedIn), many of us said at the time that they will take everyone's private/proprietary code as their property, and now they are doing exactly that and more. (if they haven't already of course. This policy change could just be a fig-leaf to justify private-data-slurping that has already occurred)

Here's hoping that microslop will be forced to delete whatever plagiarism-model results from this. It is absolutely NOT OK to steal people's private repos (and even their code review styles) without permission.

And thanks for the settings link. Although I wouldn't be surprised if it is nothing more than an an additional bitfield in my data profile, treated with no more respect than a "do not track" marker in a HTTP request..

[vtcodger]

Re: Smell that?

I wouldn't be surprised if it is nothing more than an an additional bitfield in my data profile, treated with no more respect than a "do not track" marker in a HTTP request

And, being Microsoft adjacent, it'll likely be arbitrarily reset to "Opted In" every third or fourth Github site code update.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Smell that?

it'll likely be arbitrarily reset to "Opted In"

This is US privacy standards. That should be "Not opted out".

[frankvw]

Re: Smell that?

"This policy change could just be a fig-leaf to justify private-data-slurping that has already occurred"

Could be? There's no doubt in my mind. I'm surprised you even consider the possibility that they haven't already been doing that for ages.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Smell that?

"They should never have been allowed to buy GitHub (or LinkedIn)"

Or Lynda.com

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Smell that?

"That's desperation."

That's somebody else's computer.

[aardvarkus]

Re: Smell that?

They have run out of wallets to rifle through. Now they are moving on to live imprisonment and exploitation.

[sarusa]

If you're still on GitHub you probably deserve this

I moved all my (and my companies') repositories over to Gitlab 6 months ago, which is arguably even late to the game, and deleted everything we had on GitHub. Of course nothing is ever truly deleted, but...

It's been 100% predictable (and was predicted) where all this has been going since GIthub got bought by Microslop. There was no other reason for MS to buy it other than to hoover up all your code for slop training and it was inevitable all your stuff would go to train their shit. Any exceptions for now are just part of the slow erosion, they can't last. Because literally the only thing Slopya cares about is slop. Good thing his parents named him that, huh?

[MachDiamond]

Re: If you're still on GitHub you probably deserve this

"and deleted everything we had on GitHub"

A better tactic might be to restrict accounts so regular users that were allowed can't use it anymore and then being liberal with the Strychnine. Spend a happy weekend injecting malicious code into the commits. Since it's not meant to be accessed by anybody, no foul, right?

[jake]

Re: If you're still on GitHub you probably deserve this

An even better tactic might be to keep it all in-house, where you have control over it, as opposed to keeping it on somebody else's computer, where you have absolutely zero control over it.

[sarusa]

Re: If you're still on GitHub you probably deserve this

Neither company has a competent IT guy, no way we're getting an in-house repository. We wouldn't even have source control if it relied on these clowns. So I'd set the (shared) repository up on my personal computer except I'm remote... so if the company doesn't care, I don't care any more than moving from GitHub to GitLab. And the personal stuff I have there is actually public repositories I want people to see. Which, okay, means the AI bots will probably find it anyhow, but at least I'm not standing in one of those red light district booths in Amsterdam by staying on Microslop Github.

[DrewPH]

Thanks for paragraph 3

Both options are now disabled.

(I would never use Github to host my own code but I like to follow issues sometimes)

[ecofeco]

WHCOULDAKNOWED?!

Bwhahahahaahahahahahahahahahahahahahaa

SUCKERS!

You. Were. Warned.

[MachDiamond]

Re: WHCOULDAKNOWED?!

"You. Were. Warned."

What needs to happen is teaching. Warnings are sort of hit and miss with people. There's still plenty of people that haven't internalized that relying on a third party to make your business go is problematic if that 3rd party can't be easily replaced. For example, companies that have built web apps that only run on one or two browsers and then go Tango Uniform when the browser company pushes out an "update" and that app no longer works. If the app is just a tool to do something more efficiently, fine. If it's required for employees to conduct business, the company might be flailing to find a work around while customers are getting more pissed off and spending some effort finding alternative suppliers.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never been tempted to use GitHub, but... I do have some really bad code in some old git repos that I had abandoned but which I could move across...

[original_rwg]

Bad code? I like your thinking but given the recent Patch Tuesday releases and the subsequent fixes, doesn't Micros~1 already have enough bad code?

[Bebu sa Ware]

Microslop is welcome…

to any of the smelly old code of mine that I have dropped on github and forgotten to flush.

Should poison the spring from which Crapilot is drawing its buckets of wisdom.

Some of it is very old indeed like a /sbin/mount wrapper for SGI Irix 6.x that performed Solaris type loop back mounts (mount.lofs) — can see that being really useful. ;) As too some I2O stuff for an obscure Adaptec scsi adaptor twenty+ years ago.

[cyberdemon]

Re: Microslop is welcome…

Make sure to put some bogus AI-generated pull requests, comments, code reviews etc to make it look tastier to the algorithm and really poison the well

[DJSpuddyLizard]

Exciting!

Code snippets ?

So the plan is to make the AI generate Stack Exchange-level garbage code ?

[Someone Else]

Re: Exciting!

Uhhh...doesn't it already?

[QET]

Re: AI generated Stack Exchange

It's not a bug, it's a feature.

[jake]

::shrugs::

Just about everybody I know pulled everything out of github when redmond took over ... Easier to put it in the rear-view on one's own terms, before the inevitable happens.

[Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck]

No need to opt out. I stopped using GitHub Copilot after experimenting with it and a few different LLMs and their code suggestions for a couple weeks to deal with one particular issue I had. I didn't like the way I found it working, so I haven't used it for anything else - I consider it a fraudulent technology. Sure it spits out text super-fast, but it isn't sane text, and you have to spend more time fixing the mistakes it made than it would have taken to just do it from scratch without making mistakes in the first place.

Talk about a balloon waiting to be popped; this whole "agentic" mission is just more Bafflegab for the Peons who Pay The Bills.

And man are those bills ever getting big considering it doesn't even work as promised...

[Doctor Syntax]

Somewhere, down on the 37th page of the small print you'll find a clause saying that they promise nothing.

[MachDiamond]

"and you have to spend more time fixing the mistakes it made than it would have taken to just do it from scratch without making mistakes in the first place."

That's for little things. With something more complex, it can be a slog to figure out what it's doing and debugging is next to impossible. Sure, maybe it found a more efficient way, but it's not how the vast majority of the industry would have gone about it so it's cumbersome, if not impossible, to support.

[Missing Semicolon]

Codex

It's not bad at all.

[Dan 55]

"established industry practices"

That means they do what the hell they like with other people's data, right?

[MachDiamond]

Re: "established industry practices"

"That means they do what the hell they like with other people's data, right?"

If you read through most of the social media Terms and Conditions/EULA's, that's what they're saying. By signing up for Insta and posting things, you are giving them the rights to sell/transfer that content, modify it, use it internally, worldwide and perpetually with no credit or royalty. If they never intended to do any of that, why would they need to stick those terms in the agreement?

[Empire of the Pussycat]

Abandoned GH last year, deleted everything including accounts

Never liked it, don't miss it even a little bit.

[chozorho]

Re: Abandoned GH last year, deleted everything including accounts

I've gotta ask: do you have side projects? And do you self-host the source code?

I have very mixed feelings about GitHub; I boycotted them for three years after M$ took over, but then I broke the boycott during the pandemic. Due to their sheer size and name recognition, GitHub offers the promise of relief from the loneliness/isolation that I felt, when I was struggling to find developers who would do code reviews and work with me collaboratively. (Granted, most people ignored my Pull Requests, but... where else am I to go, to meet open-source developers during a pandemic?)

[jake]

Re: Abandoned GH last year, deleted everything including accounts

"where else am I to go, to meet open-source developers during a pandemic?"

Contrary to popular belief, IRC, email and specialty/private Usenet hierarchies still exist.

[Anonymous Coward]

But Wait....There's More....................

OK.....so GitHub/Microsoft have actually told their users about the impending slurp.

But what about all those others (you know, ChatGtp, Perplexity, META, OpenAI, Google/DeepMind, ORACLE, SAP...........)

The "big data" slurp has been going on for YEARS.......Yup.....PETABYTES of OTHER PEOPLE'S COPYRIGHT material.........

.......now available from your local AI vendor.

Consent? Hah......you must be joking!

[elsergiovolador]

Re: But Wait....There's More....................

What execs connected to Epstein would know about consent ;-)

[Flightmode]

But among the 39 posts commenting on the change at the time this article was filed, no one other than Martin Woodward, GitHub VP of developer relations, has really endorsed the idea.

Sounds like he might not be the right person for that position...

[M.V. Lipvig]

You think M$ would hire someone to run it that doesn't think it's a good idea?

[pip25]

They've already been doing this

They just didn't tell you. Private repos (and everything else not easily accessible from the open web) may have been the main exceptions. Now those are fair game as well, I suppose.

The poster above is right. They must be really desperate if they believe this will help improve their products in any way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: They've already been doing this

They'll probably publish a CVE that granted their AI access to the entire github environment....AFTER that date.

[M.V. Lipvig]

The genie's out of the bottle

And as we all know, genies don't like going back in. Second best to stuffing it back in is turn it into an idiot, and that's up to you what let the damned thing loose to begin with.

M$ wants to train on your code? Let it. Load in that crap from high school you wrote that was so bad the teacher didn't grade it, just stapled a fast food application to it. Write viruses designed to make an AI spread it around, overwrite backups and lock the machine. Write stuff that looks logical but twists back on itself, drawing more and more resources until it locks the machine while copying itself - and with a watchdog that restarts the process an hour after the machine comes back on. You get the idea.

If the genie can't go back into the lamp, make it into something nobody wants.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The genie's out of the bottle

> And as we all know, genies don't like going back in. Second best to stuffing it back in is turn it into an idiot, and that's up to you what let the damned thing loose to begin with.

Can confirm genies don't like going back in. But when American voters let the genie out of the bottle, it hasn't exactly been a good thing that the genie is also a demented idiot.

[MachDiamond]

Re: The genie's out of the bottle

"was so bad the teacher didn't grade it, just stapled a fast food application to it. "

Oh, that's massively cruel, that is. I'll have to remember that and get some of those applications to use at the right moment when I'm fine with being a right bastard.

[munnoch]

"By participating, you'll help our models better understand development workflows"

By participating you'll be cutting your own throat. FTFY.

[Someone Else]

He would say that...

But among the 39 posts commenting on the change at the time this article was filed, no one other than Martin Woodward, GitHub VP of developer relations, has really endorsed the idea.

And you expected anything less. It's like Steven Miller sycophantizing about the Orange-utan's immigration policy. What's telling is that he is the lone voice.

[chozorho]

Re: He would say that...

*Stephen

[Anonymous Coward]

Git lost.

[Random as if !]

Hapsburg Code

I have AI code , I store it in GitHub, loads of it.

It's going to eat/breed with itself

Fair enough, enjoy.

[The Central Scrutinizer]

Microsoft's GitHub next month plans to begin using customer interaction data – "specifically inputs, outputs, code snippets, and associated context" – to train its AI models.

But of course. All your data belongs to us.

Fuck off.

[[e-mail]]

For the good of all

I am sure that many of you, like me, in an effort to get away from Copilot, have switch to other git providers like codeberg.org. Even so, if you still have a github.com account I suggest that you log in to github and follow the instructions to disable Copilot completely - or as completely as Microsoft will allow. This will register every so slightly on the Microsoft corporate "brain" that people don't like Copilot and it is an foolish business venture. At least we can hope.

[Anonymous Coward]

Trust a checkbox ?

must idiots to trust an opt out checkbox.

sorry.. there was a bug that ignored the checkbox...

1. keep all code on premises.

2. no vscode or other browser shell editors or application for own code.

3. no openclaw reading all your drives.

4. no Windows slopware.

5. no api tokens based API , only OAUTH.

6. no python, node based MCPs,

[Anonymous Coward]

I have noticed that, Ai research that we are doing and saving to GitHub, is released as a leading microsharft development a week later, despite tilling us we are in the top 3%

[rcw88]

Opted out gone to Codeberg

Says it all, thatks for the link, I've disabled everything the link takes me to.

But I moved my current and all future repos to Codeberg six months ago because, well AI trained on buggy content [not mine necessarily] will return buggy content, and it takes a human to understand the difference.

AI trained on private and copyrighted content is theft plain and simple, just because it can be done doesn't mean doing do is morally right.

Google, Meta et al don't give a fsck about morality, just money and content that is enshittified.