Feed: Slashdot
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Title: GitHub Users Angry at the Prospect of AI-Written Issues From Copilot

Link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/06/0...

Earlier this month the "Create New Issue" page on GitHub got a new option.
"Save time by creating issues with Copilot" (next to a link labeled "Get
started." Though the option later disappeared, they'd seemed very committed
to the feature. "With Copilot, creating issues...is now faster and easier,"
GitHub's blog announced May 19. (And "all without sacrificing quality."
Describe the issue you want and watch as Copilot fills in your issue form...
Skip lengthy descriptions - just upload an image with a few words of
context.... We hope these changes transform issue creation from a chore into
a breeze. But in the GitHub Community discussion, these announcements
prompted a request. "Allow us to block Copilot-generated issues (and Pull
Requests) from our own repositories." This says to me that GitHub will soon
start allowing GitHub users to submit issues which they did not write
themselves and were machine-generated. I would consider these issues/PRs to
be both a waste of my time and a violation of my projects' code of conduct.
Filtering out AI-generated issues/PRs will become an additional burden for me
as a maintainer, wasting not only my time, but also the time of the issue
submitters (who generated "AI" content I will not respond to), as well as the
time of your server (which had to prepare a response I will close without
response). As I am not the only person on this website with "AI"-hostile
beliefs, the most straightforward way to avoid wasting a lot of effort by
literally everyone is if Github allowed accounts/repositories to have a
checkbox or something blocking use of built-in Copilot tools on designated
repos/all repos on the account. 1,239 GitHub users upvoted the comment - and
125 comments followed. "I have now started migrating repos off of github..."
"Disabling AI generated issues on a repository should not only be an option,
it should be the default." "I do not want any AI in my life, especially in my
code." "I am not against AI necessarily but giving it write-access to most of
the world's mission-critical code-bases including building-blocks of the
entire web... is an extremely tone-deaf move at this early-stage of AI. " One
user complained there was no "visible indication" of the fact that an issue
was AI-generated "in either the UI or API." Someone suggested a Copilot-
blocking Captcha test to prevent AI-generated slop. Another commenter even
suggested naming it "Sloptcha". And after more than 10 days, someone noticed
the "Create New Issue" page seemed to no longer have the option to "Save time
by creating issues with Copilot." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader jddj
for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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