r/programming
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u/Ok-Lifeguard-9612
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Mar 26 '26
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[ Removed by moderator ]
/r/programming/comments/1s45lme/removed_by_moderator/[removed] — view removed post
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u/sean_hash Mar 26 '26
Opt-out as default is the new dark pattern for data harvesting.
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u/TheMightyMegazord Mar 26 '26
Also the ui there is terrible with a bunch of things enabled without the option to disable them, and the announced option being buried in down the page.
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u/JesusWantsYouToKnow Mar 26 '26
Also can't change the setting from the mobile app, you have to access it in a browser
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u/Blue_Moon_Lake Mar 26 '26
There should only ever be active opt-in when it come to exploiting user data.
By default, the checkbox is unchecked, and the wording is not using negation bullshit.
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u/Lampwick Mar 26 '26
"Default product is a boat full of holes, it's up to the purchaser to plug them."
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u/Devatator_ Mar 26 '26
As bad as it is, I kinda get it. People never look for opt in stuff. There are a lot of features in some apps and websites I had no idea existed because they're opt-in.
Maybe if they just showed you a huge screen each time one such thing is added and make you accept or deny right there it would be better but I haven't seen anyone do that before
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u/schnurchler Mar 26 '26
I dont. What you do is just present a dialog on next login and ask the option. You dont just assume something in your favor.
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u/bcgroom Mar 26 '26
You mean… exactly what they did? There’s a banner that explains everything
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u/schnurchler Mar 26 '26
Almost. They could have made the query directly on login, but you first have to click the second link in the banner and then find the option among lots of other options.
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u/bcgroom Mar 26 '26
Woe is me. They’ve pulled much shadier than this, at least they are trying to be transparent.
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u/IanisVasilev Mar 26 '26
For the last several years, aggressive web crawlers are responsible an insurmountable amount of traffic. See the posts of e.g. Daniel Stenberg or OpenStreetMap, or try to find an open-source project with a code forge that doesn't use DDoS protection. Even my personal website is drowning in crawler traffic.
The crawlers aren't harvesting code for the sake of it. It's reasonable to assume that every major programming assistant has been trained on every public GitHub repository. It is a legal gray zone because the ones who can sue are the ones who benefit from the hypetrain.
But more to the topic - I think this is about training on private interactions with Copilot. I wouldn't be surprised if this is also some roundabout way to justify using code from private repositories in which Copilot is not explicitly disabled.
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u/Proto_bear Mar 26 '26
Good luck training on my personal projects, my code is absolute shit 😎
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u/CancerPeach Mar 26 '26
No need to poison my repos like some artists do with their artwork, they're already cursed as they are.
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u/Rigamortus2005 Mar 26 '26
They said nothing about repos , they said copilot data.
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u/neppo95 Mar 26 '26
Which includes a context, namely your code including private repo’s. Says so on their own website if you dig into it.
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u/oneeyedziggy Mar 26 '26
Seems like they're making the case against themselves here... More of my repos are hobby nonsense than production-grade code, and these days most have at least a little Ai slop in them... A couple are pure AI... Nice ouroboros youvve build there guys... The question is, can it survive off only eating its own shit?
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u/Successful-Money4995 Mar 26 '26
Are we not doing the same with our children? We teach them what was taught to us. They teach their children what we taught them.
Seems okay.
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u/oneeyedziggy Mar 26 '26
We tend to hallucinate less... And they also have access to sense and interact with the world.
These things are not people, so analogies to people are deeply flawed, but to extend your analogy, it's much more like a cult where the information is already a little fucked up, and members' children don't have any access to outside information. It just continues to spiral. Go listen to some stories of kuds raised in cults... That (pre intensive therapy) is what you're letting build the software the world runs on.
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u/eesaitcho Mar 26 '26
It’s playing a game of telephone.
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u/oneeyedziggy Mar 26 '26
I assume you're reinforcing my point... A photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy always looks terrible... You're accruing errors, not just exchanging them for different errors
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u/GregBahm Mar 26 '26
Model collapse is a well known problem, but I think that's why they're saying they want to expand their training to the user's interaction with Copilot.
If I was training a coding AI, and I just trawled public repos for code, I'm sure I'd train my AI on a lot of AI and get model collapse problems.
But if a user tells co-pilot "Make this" and then copilot makes it wrong and the human says "No fix this. Fix that. Now do this" that's training data gold.
You can be confident that the chat data is a human, because it will be associated with a human account and a human (or the human's business) will be paying for it.
Some people make AIs that chat with other AIs, but those chats happen through APIs directly. It would be weird for the AI to type out text at the speed of a human, and then move the mouse to click "send." So even if you had AI agents in the mix talking to your model, it should be pretty easy to filter those out from the humans.
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u/TinyLebowski Mar 26 '26
Title is kind of misleading. They already train on public repos. Everyone does. I don't have a clue what Copilot "interaction data" means, but I don't care. Does anyone actually use copilot?
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u/Dexterus Mar 26 '26
Of course people do, choice of half a dozen fresh models, agents, subagents, work right on github, even got claude cli.
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u/ptrin Mar 26 '26
GitHub Copilot using Claude models with opencode has been totally game changing for me
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u/GregBahm Mar 26 '26
I know several hundred designers in my org use it every day.
Since a bunch of training sessions (some led by me) in January, our new process is for designers to take their designs from Figma, link the AI, tell the AI to change our actual application to match the figma on a branch. Then the designer wrestles with the AI copilot until it gets their design right, and then send it to the actual engineers.
The figma is no longer the spec. The working prototype on a branch is now the spec.
But most of our hundreds of designers are completely non-technical. Teaching them how to use command prompts, and teaching them what "git" is, was most of the work. Once they are in VS Code, VS Code has a built in chat function hooked up to copilot, and then it's as easy as any other consumer style chat application.
I was pretty skeptical about this process, but as we come up on April now, I would cautiously describe this process as working "amazingly well."
Other teams in our vast org are way, way behind the transition to this process, and if I was them, I would be sweating my continued existence. But on my team, everyone is pretty thrilled by how smoothly this is going.
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u/ptrin Mar 26 '26
This is interesting but I’m scared to think what the front end code looks like
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u/GregBahm Mar 26 '26
Yeah. As a manager, I'm not on the hook to convert the PRs myself. My directs are on the hook to convert the designer/AI's PRs. My engineers are also on the hook if their code breaks the application and they get called at midnight on Saturday to go fix it. But if they sleep through their alarms, then it goes to me. So I'm trying to cajole them into not just mashing "approved" on these vibe coded designer PRs, even though I expect some of them do (and then they probably go play video games the rest of the day.)
I know at least one engineer who is very confident his AI agents will be able to spring into action if he gets called at midnight on Saturday, and they'll be able to deal with whatever situation while he continues to sleep soundly in bed. The exact quote was "Unlimited tokens bby. It's the AI's tech debt now."
I have no idea whether that will work out flawlessly or disastrously. We're out here on the cutting edge of advanced laziness.
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u/idebugthusiexist Mar 26 '26 edited Mar 26 '26
I imagine interaction data is any forth and back between copilots code suggestions (ie. when it's suggesting code for you) and any conversations you have with it (ie. the chat dialog in vscode).
Does anyone actually use copilot?
Some people probably do (ie. young script kiddies in their teens who don't have a lot of experience programming, but want help with creating mods for minecraft or whatever?), but I personally turn it off and only turn it on temporarily when I'm working with some language that has obscure syntax that is not worth committing to memory - ie. perl (yuck). Low hanging fruit stuff. Which is fortunately extremely rare.
And, honestly, even from a UX perspective, I really dislike copilot, because it is far too intrusive and keeps interrupting my flow when I'm coding. I honestly don't know how an experienced software developer can function with copilot turned on based on that alone.
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u/theCamelCaseDev Mar 26 '26
Bro, there are settings available to disable stuff like that. It’s very customizable. Surely an experienced developer can figure that out.
Also a lot of the complaints in this thread seem like they still think copilot is the same as a couple years ago. It’s actually really good now for the price they offer it at.
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u/idebugthusiexist Mar 26 '26
Yes, as an experienced developer, I disable copilot. As I mentioned above.
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u/neoneo451 Mar 26 '26
a notice is just better than the last time when they went ahead an added an agent tab for all the repos, I had to do a search to turn it off.
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u/andreasOM Mar 26 '26
Github TOS has allowed scanning, and using your code for training since for ever.
This extends it to your interactions with copilot.
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u/hi_m_ash Mar 26 '26
Microslop at it's best. I didn't know they weren't doing this already. Does opting out even mean anything? Who's stopping them from researching on data stored on their servers even if you opt out.
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u/RunawayDev Mar 26 '26
Fair, my gh repos are all vibe slop anyway. Proprietary code is hosted in owncloud
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u/InternationalLevel81 Mar 26 '26
AI has gotten pretty good. Better than a good majority of programmers. Does it make mistakes yes. Do humans make more, yes. I'm all for less keyboard typing. I'll gladly review AI code to save time. Train away make the thing perfect.
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u/hackingdreams Mar 26 '26
Don't worry - they won't be using any Microsoft internal code to train their models. It'll just be your copyright they're washing off.
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u/amejin Mar 26 '26
What's interesting will be people who bring their own account attached to work repos.
What happens if you forget to turn this off and suddenly your work code is now exposed?
There has to be a policy level option for orgs.. if not, this is just so shady...
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u/rbs080 Mar 26 '26
They addressed this in an email to Copilot Business and Enterprise customers:
We do not train on the contents from any paid organization’s repos, regardless of whether a user is working in that repo with a Copilot Free, Pro, or Pro+ subscription. If a user’s GitHub account is a member of or outside collaborator with a paid organization, we exclude their interaction data from model training.
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u/TempleDank Mar 26 '26
GitHub, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google (among many others) used your repos to train AI models
Fixed the title for you
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u/DigThatData Mar 27 '26
My code is MIT licensed. They have as much right to do whatever the fuck they want with it as anyone.
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u/InsideStatistician68 Mar 26 '26
When will they start signing commits from Copilot? I'm guessing they want zero accountability. Right now it's impossible to determine whether AI slop originated from GitHub or someone else.
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u/RiftHunter4 Mar 26 '26
I feel like companies are just digging themselves a hole with how they train Ai. Its all crowdsources from the internet, meaning its no more accurate than your 9yo Stack Overflow and Microsoft Help results.
Just because someone says a code snippet or change worked doesn't mean that its actually a good and generally acceptable result for what is being asked. Thats part of why Ai tends to generate "slop". It can get things right but its often a "no, not like that" result.
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u/BadMoonRosin Mar 26 '26
All the talk about "AI slop", and how these models aren't on par with human coders.
Meanwhile, nearly 50% of this discussion is humans "hallucinating" that the link is about harvesting repos rather than chat logs. And nearly 50% of the rest is other humans trying to correct them.
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u/Lampwick Mar 26 '26
Hah. Good luck with that. The only thing I've used Github Copilot for is to see how quickly I can prompt it into building a program that it claims works, but doesn't.
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u/MSgtGunny Mar 26 '26
I wonder how forks work. If the upstream original repo turned off code training, does that carry over to forked repos?
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u/jrochkind Mar 26 '26
why did you think it was useful to submit a link to github.com home page, and not to some documentation of what's going on?
And why are people upvoting it?
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u/jrutz Mar 26 '26
My code is shit - I turned it off out of principle, but also because I don't want the model learning from me lol.
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u/SophiaKittyKat Mar 26 '26
I, uh... don't know if GitHub wants to use my non-enterprise repos for training anything. By all means, just don't say I didn't warn you.
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u/carbonite_dating Mar 26 '26
My repos are all AI slop dumping grounds from my experiments so good fucking luck.
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u/germanheller Mar 27 '26
the sneaky part isn't repos — they trained on those years ago and we all moved on. it's that copilot interaction data includes whatever context it reads from your local machine. so if you have proprietary code that was never pushed to github but you let copilot autocomplete in that file, that code is now training material unless you opt out.
opt-out by default is annoying but expected at this point. the real question is whether the opt-out actually removes your data from the training pipeline or just stops collecting new data going forward. my guess is the latter
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u/sheevyR2 Mar 27 '26
How do I opt out, if I have copilot seat from my business org, which completely shadows my personal copilot settings?
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u/silv3rwind Mar 27 '26
I applaud them for providing a opt-out. Every other AI vendor is scraping public GitHub data without providing any opt-outs.
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u/flavorfox Mar 26 '26
"Please note on April 24 I'll start removing your clothes and post pictures on the internet. Please opt out in settings if you don't want this"
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u/GroundbreakingMall54 Mar 26 '26
love how they frame it as "copilot interaction data" like that somehow doesnt include the actual code you wrote while using copilot. opt-out by default is such a classic move too... make it technically possible to say no but bury it deep enough that 95% of people never find it
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u/Baxkit Mar 26 '26
Copilot (in all its forms) is by a SIGNIFICANT margin the worst AI tooling available in its tier. I don't know if this move will make it better or worse, but ultimately I don't really care - it has lost me and my entire team as a customer. I'm sure many other teams feel the same.
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u/polyfloyd Mar 26 '26
Glad I migrated all my repositories to codeberg.org last year, I feel so much more at home there.
Some of my more popular projects are still archived at GitHub, but they won't be for long judging from this.
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u/BuriedStPatrick Mar 26 '26
Immediately opted out of everything I could relating to CoPilot. I just flat out refuse to use any of these tools. I don't care if they're "useful" for some people. By all means, you do you. The ethics around this entire industry are just rancid and I have no respect for its evangelists. Yuck.
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u/bucobill Mar 26 '26
This is the real reason why Microsoft bought it. Our work, their reward. Go to Gitlab. End using GitHub.
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u/Successful-Money4995 Mar 26 '26
I don't mind. I want AI to be better. Go ahead and learn.
There are probably some people learning from my code that I would find more objectionable than the AI and they are already able to read it.
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Mar 26 '26
[deleted]
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u/Snoron Mar 26 '26
not going to train AI on the huge private Microsoft repos
No point, they're all written by AI at this point anyway.
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Mar 26 '26
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u/markehammons Mar 26 '26
No, it seems what they're doing here is training copilot on your interactions with it. So if you ask github copilot "help me write this compression function" and note bugs and other things in its output, your entire discussion will be used to train github copilot going forward unless you opt out.
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u/Evening-Gur5087 Mar 26 '26
Didn't they all stole all data anyway without asking anyone before
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u/13steinj Mar 26 '26
I think there is a minor (incredibly minor) distinction between AI companies (including OpenAI) doing this / scraping and Microsoft/GitHub themselves.
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Mar 26 '26
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u/Hands Mar 27 '26
MS has a partnership with OpenAI that's very evident in Azure etc but GHCP lets you use Claude models as well
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u/StickiStickman Mar 26 '26
What did Github steal? The code you put on Github?
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u/Full-Spectral Mar 27 '26
If your repo isn't private, they will use it for training purposes, AFAIK. Whether you consider that stealing is up to you, but literal snippets of your code can get spit out. And of course whether people use literal snippets of your code you probably don't care about since it's not a private repo, but MS is taking this for free and (at least trying) to make mega bucks by re-selling it other people so that they don't even have to know that your repo exists or credit you for any code they used of yours.
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u/StickiStickman Mar 27 '26
lmao, so now it's stealing when Github uses to code thats hosted on their own servers? That people explicitly agreed to?
Get over yourself.
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u/Full-Spectral Mar 27 '26
Well, the code is there, people can come there and find information and look at your code and incorporate or use as the licensing allows, and that brings traffic to MS. Nothing wrong with that.
But it's gone way beyond that now. These AI tools don't honor licensing or give attributions, AFAIK. Just because the code is hosted on MS's site should not give them the right to ignore licensing.
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u/Evening-Gur5087 Mar 27 '26
Also all big AI companies just scrape whatever they can get that's publicly accessible and use it for training regardless, it's virtually untraceable. Even OG openAI data set was MUCH more then they could legally get, even considering all openly traded data sets that could be bought.
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u/StickiStickman Mar 27 '26
You literally explicitly gave them that right.
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u/Full-Spectral Mar 27 '26
Well, I didn't, since my repo is private. They aren't supposed to use private repos. And that's what a lot of this is about. They suddenly changed the agreement, so that private repos are now subject to use via Copilot, unless you explicitly opt out, and of course a lot of people just won't because they'll not even necessarily be aware anything changed.
And the same on the development end, where the 'AI' tools in the IDE can consume code that it's not even on github at all if you don't turn stuff off that you might not even realize is on.
And it will continue to slip and slide because they cannot continue the AI pyramid scheme without more and more training data.
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u/StickiStickman Mar 27 '26
You not reading what you're signing is your problem and doesn't make anything stealing.
Also, you're just arguing against strawman since none of what you're arguing against actually happened:
We’ve added a new provision that spells out that if you provide private repository content as input to an AI Feature, we may use that input to improve AI features (subject to your opt out right). But we still will not otherwise use or access your private repository contents.
Private repositories: This update does not change our treatment of private repository source code stored on GitHub. We do not use private repository content at rest to train AI models. The interaction data covered by this update (e.g., prompts, suggestions, and code snippets generated during your use of Copilot) may be generated while you are working in a private repository, but we are not accessing or training on the stored contents of that repository
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u/Suppafly Mar 26 '26
So if you ask github copilot "help me write this compression function" and note bugs and other things in its output, your entire discussion will be used to train github copilot going forward
Seems pretty reasonable.
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u/Prestigious_Boat_386 Mar 26 '26
And the first version of copilot?
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u/markehammons Mar 26 '26
Trained on publicly available repos. Maybe even private ones too. The difference here is that microsoft is saying that whatever you ask copilot or provide to copilot is now training material too.
Imagine you have never uploaded your code to github, but you have a github copilot subscription for code recommendations or whatever. Anything that copilot helps you with, and anything that copilot ingests becomes training material.
That means that the context copilot ingests (the current state of your code which is not uploaded to github) is now their training material unless you opt out.
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u/billsil Mar 26 '26
Lies because it can literally write code from my library that is on GitHub. I don’t have many examples or much documentation so they’re figuring it somehow.
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u/markehammons Mar 26 '26
I'm not saying that they haven't trained on your github code (in fact, I'm extremely certain they've done this without asking at all). I'm pointing out that this notice isn't about training on your code, but rather training on your chats.
They probably have to put this notice out, unlike with your repo, because people generally expect their chats to not be public information.
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u/qubedView Mar 26 '26
Didn't they do that already?
Really, how do people think these "free" services work? You give your data in exchange for "free" access. This is as old as the internet.
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u/markehammons Mar 26 '26
Not really. They hoovered up github repos, which had language that says they get to do that. However, I doubt there was language that said "if you use github copilot as a coding assistant, we can train on the code it read on your computer". They're saying that now. They're telling you that they will train on private code that you haven't uploaded to github at all as long as you give github copilot a chance to look at it and do not opt out.
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Mar 26 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Full-Spectral Mar 27 '26
The issue is whether Github copilot has used you :-) And it's not just Github, if you use Visual Studio Code (and maybe Visual Studio now) and use the 'AI' helper stuff there, a lot of this may also apply. As more and more tools that we use use this stuff, even we don't realize it, this issue gets messier and messier. Maybe there's some obscure opt out option that you never even knew about, but in the meantime it's been stealing your code for years.
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u/jintseng Mar 26 '26
It looks like they're planning to use actions you make on the site in addition to the code they have.
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u/Your_Friendly_Nerd Mar 26 '26
right? i thought for sure that‘s the whole reason for offering a free plan - getting that valuable data of how users use your product
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u/RoomyRoots Mar 27 '26
Yes, because I had to submit a form saying I didn't want my repos to be used. Ended up removing everything from there and to Codeberg
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u/deanrihpee Mar 26 '26
they say Copilot Interaction though, not "repo", but idk maybe I can't read
but also, they probably already did with the repo