Microsoft fixes VS Code after app gives Copilot credit for human's work

Imagine working your butt off on a project, only to have VS Code put an attribution into your commit that says Copilot helped you, even if it did not. Microsoft has reversed a change that added a default AI attribution notice after user complaints that the bot was claiming credit for human-authored code. The initial change – a …

[Blackjack]

What it will take for an OFF Switch to be an option? For Copilot to kill people?

[A. Coatsworth]

It will depend on how many people is killed (c.f. Ford Pinto) or whether the anyone in the family of the deceased accepted an EULA (c.f. Disney)

Damn, this distopy keeps getting better and better

[Anonymous Coward]

Just stick it in a self driving car and it can join the club.

[elsergiovolador]

Difference

Human, Robot. I see no screws. I have a robot friend myself.

[Brave Coward]

Not so many legal implications but still...

Reminds me of the assholes that can't be bothered to remove the 'Sent from my Shitphone XXX' final sentence from the signature of their emails.

[may_i]

Re: Not so many legal implications but still...

The "Sent from my smartphone xxx" comments are actually added to the user's message by an app called Tapatalk.

This horrible app requires that the forum owner installs a plugin to enable it. Once installed, the plugin interfaces with the Tapatalk app. The big problem is what else it does. Regardless of the forum's robots.txt, the Tapatalk plugin downloads every message from the forum so that Tapatalk can use the data for searching and anything else they want to use it for.

Best avoided.

[MiguelC]

Re: Not so many legal implications but still...

Tapatalk may also do it, I'd never heard of it before.

But most email apps come by default with that kind of signature, and the user has to disable it to stop it being automatically added to all messages

[Irongut]

Re: Not so many legal implications but still...

Tapatalk? Forum owners??? What bollocks are you talking?

Outlook, GMail and Apple Mail (or whatever they call it) all add this line automatically by default, as did Blackberrys so it's not new behaviour.

[degraded RAID]

Re: Not so many legal implications but still...

He wasn't saying it was new. And yeah, signatures were old hat even in the 90s. (Hell, I had a file of thousands of quotes to add randomly to news posts. ("Bother", said Pooh, as Klingons destroyed his ship.))

[Taliesinawen]

All hail our new AI overlords :o

Current AIs are not truly intelligent. They encode training data as tokens embedded in a high-dimensional vector space. The positions of these embeddings, together with learned weights in the attention mechanisms, capture statistical associations and contextual dependencies between tokens.

Combined with user input, these patterns generate new tokens that are decoded into text. Consequently, their accuracy is fundamentally limited by the quality and content of their training data, which consists largely of material scraped from the World Wide Web.

What’s more sinister is the tendency of AI developers to embed their own biases and prejudices into the models through training data selection and reinforcement learning. With every word you type, major AI companies are watching in real time. This is engineered ideological control wrapped in the friendly mask of technology.

[Gavsky]

Re: All hail our new AI overlords :o

"Current AIs are not truly intelligent" - I would adjust that to "NO AI is remotely intelligent & never will be; the very model precludes intelligence, understanding & discernment"...

[Clausewitz4.1]

Code completion

” The settings change was intended to "[add] the trailer for all AI-generated code, including inline completions."

Code completion has been around for years. Now its AI-coauthored? I expect soon an study saying “90% of human-produced code is now made with AI help”, based on commits.

[Edward Jazzhands]

Re: Code completion

This is by far the most important comment here. Anyone who programs for a living knows it's absurd to now be lumping in AI code auto completion with "AI generated code". Using In-line suggestions is not the same thing as code being "AI generated". Suggestions only guess the very next thing you're about to type in, and in the vast majority of situations it only guesses whatever you were about to type yourself. This has been a standard feature in IDEs for years now, long before agents ever became a thing that made this a hot issue. If this is considered AI generated code then by the same standard, copy pasting code from StackOverflow does not count as programming.

[Daniel Pfeffer]

Re: Code completion

copy pasting code from StackOverflow does not count as programming.

It isn't.

[Edward Jazzhands]

Re: Code completion

Ok, you're wrong and that's a very pretentious thing to say. Copying code from online tutorials is not programming now?

[WigglesVonSpiggles]

Salute our solutions

If they are going to add an “AI attribution” notice automatically, how about at the same time they add attribution notices and licenses for all the pieces of code they scraped without permission to “inspire” their AI contribution?

[sarusa]

More lies

The flood of enshittification just won't stop, can't stop.

> "There was no ill intent by [an] evil corporation, but rather a desire to support functionality

Uh huh. Surely not Microslop wanting to make it look like Copilot is used a lot more than it actually is.

The most damning thing is if it saw there was something it thought was AI, like if MS had silently jammed copilot into your setup (as they do) or if you had spell checking on (because of course spell checking is AI, right?) it would assume that if you had it there you must be using it so Copilot should get the work for all your code! And then of course, opting you in by default is always ill intent.

On the other hand, if you're still using Microslop's shit maybe you deserve what you get... but I realize a lot of that is out of actual coders' hands and is the decision of dumbass C-levels who've been bought off by MS.

[Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch]

Exactly this.

It is agentic personalities like this, who can internally disguise and repurpose the corporate evil intent as something innocent or actually helpful, that make the evil possible.

[Jason Bloomberg]

Re: More lies

The flood of enshittification just won't stop, can't stop.

Reeling from the shock of the new El Reg home page layout and other design changes I can only say; no it won't.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: More lies

Yep, they replaced my entry point https://www.theregister.com/Week/ with https://www.theregister.com/archive ... And the main page wellll, you already said it.

[mcswell]

It's also the case that since VS Code v1.116, Copilot is automatically part of the VS Code editor--it's no longer a plugin. It's there whether you want it or not, and even if you've disabled it.

[Throg]

VS Codium

I’m only an occasional user of VS Code but this is why I’ve switched to VS Codium. No telemetry, no tracking and most important of all, no Copillock.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Isn't that blatant theft and copyright infringement?

Putting someone others name below something done, here code, somewhere else paintings, simply copyright infringement, and theft?

Here in a really really large scale? Since those companies are still US based this calls for the next class action lawsuit.

[sindrelspec]

VSCodium intstead?

I've been using VSCodium instead of VS Code for a few years now. Are there good reasons for using VS Code instead of VSCodium if you don't want the AI features? Aren't most extensions in the Open VSX repository now?

[Clausewitz4.1]

Re: VSCodium intstead?

I may switch as well to VSCodium. It seems it lacks the AI “features” and telemetry (spying) from MS.

[Anonymous Coward]

OPT-IN

motherfucker, do you speak it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: OPT-IN

Opt-in to which?

Opt-in to using Copilot at all? That can easily be agreed with.

Or opt-in to having your use of Copilot announced to the world, making keeping schtum about your little habit the default?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: OPT-IN

Opt-in to anything. No more 'we've checked everything for your convenience, but you can't cancel it later in the settings.'

[sarusa]

Re: OPT-IN

> Or opt-in to having your use of Copilot announced to the world, making keeping schtum about your little habit the default?

The biggest(?) problem here is that it was telling everyone you were a shitty vibe coder using Copilot *even if you weren't* - even if you hated everything it stands for. You are now, for eternity, 'on record' as being one of those chucklef@#$s even though you were completely innocent.

[Throg]

Re: OPT-IN

Agreed.

My Echo Show recently “upgraded” me to Alexa+ Early Access. It don’t ask, it just did it.

The thing has been irritating me for a long while, but until now I’ve put up with Amazon’s nonsense as it was a handy kitchen timer and smart speaker.

This has pushed me into doing the right thing: jailbreaking it and installing LineageOS.

[ComputerSays_noAbsolutelyNo]

This is how it starts & ends

First, CoPilot automatically add attribution to itself to all commits.

Then some brain-dead, AI-hyped executives "realize" that AI is doing all the work, so all the meat bags can be fired.

As no remains to tell CoPilot what to do, the company falters.

AI is truly going to take away our job, however, not in the way some envision.

[[e-mail]]

One word for y'all

Codium

[DoctorPaul]

One small ray of hope in the article

Despite their many appalling failures around the issue of actually paying claims, insurance companies have literally centuries of experience in dispassionately assessing risk.

Now if they all just say "we won't cover you if you use AI" what are businesses to do?

[degraded RAID]

Re: One small ray of hope in the article

Dispassionately? Nah, profit is more important than objectivity.

[Gavsky]

Well, I'm reminded about that famous quote by Bill Gates: "All your base are belong to us". I had to ask Co-pilot though...

[ecofeco]

9000?!

9000. What power this is?

[ecofeco]

Suckers

I still can't believe how many people thought M$ taking over Github was ever going to end well for themselves.