Software developers have noticed that Microsoft Copilot AI is inserting advertising «tips» into pull requests on GitHub. This could have affected about 1.5 million pull requests.
Software developers have noticed that Microsoft Copilot AI is inserting advertising «tips» into pull requests on GitHub. This could have affected about 1.5 million pull requests.
As Neowin reports, Microsoft Copilot ad injections recommend integration with services such as Raycast, Slack, Teams, and various IDEs.
According to software developer Zach Manson, one of his team members used artificial intelligence to fix a simple mistake in the text of a merge request. Copilot completed the task, but also edited the pull request description.
«Quickly launch Copilot encoding agent jobs from anywhere on your macOS or Windows computer using Raycast,» the AI added in its recommendation.
A search for this phrase on GitHub shows that the same ad copy appears in over 11,000 pull requests across thousands of repositories. It was also found in pull requests on GitLab.
In a comment to Windows Latest, Microsoft stated that GitHub will not contain advertising, and that Copilot’s «recommendations» in pull requests were due to a bug.
«GitHub does not and does not plan to advertise on GitHub. We discovered a programming logic issue with the GitHub Copilot coding agent hint, which was appearing in the wrong context in a pull request comment. We have since removed the agent hints from comments,» said Martin Woodward, VP of Developer Engagement at GitHub.
According to him, these «recommendations» were originally intended only for pull requests created by Copilot, but due to a bug they also appeared in some pull requests created by humans when Copilot was asked to edit the code.
