Microsoft denies injecting ads into GitHub pull requests — blames "programming logic issue" for 11,000 "coding agent tip" insertions

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.

"⚡ Quickly spin up Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with Raycast," reads the pull request. Text preceded by an emoji is a common trope that appears within content generated by Copilot.

Manson said of the addition, "This is horrific. I knew this kind of bullshit would happen eventually, but I didn't expect it so soon."

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.

Martin Woodward, Vice President of Developer Relations at GitHub explained on X that Copilot was able to add product tips to pull requests on GitHub, but that the behavior has since been disabled following feedback.

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.

What's an ad anyway?

Martin Woodward, Vice President of Developer Relations at GitHub, shared a statement with Windows Central regarding the tips added to GitHub pull requests:

"GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in GitHub. We identified a programming logic issue with a GitHub Copilot coding agent tip that surfaced in the wrong context within a pull request comment. We have removed agent tips from pull request comments moving forward."

I believe Microsoft and general users disagree on the definition of an ad. Even when admitting that the tips suggesting Copilot appeared in pull requests, Woodward referred to the text as a "coding agent tip."

As noted above, the phrase, "START COPILOT CODING AGENT TIPS" appears in a search of pull requests 11,000 times. If you define that type of tip as an ad, GitHub already includes thousands of ads.

Even Woodward's statement has a different tone than his X post on the topic. Woodward said "the beaviour became icky" on X and added that they "disabled product tips entirely thanks to the feedback."

The fact that Microsoft could "disable product tips entirely" suggests that the feature was something the GitHub team knew about and could work on, even if the exact way it appeared in pull requests was deemed "icky."

I expected that the definition of an ad would come into play with this story, so I shared a poll about the topic in the original version of this piece. Early voting shows that the vast majority of participants believe the tips are ads, though the poll has a small sample size at the moment.

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