After developers expressed their distaste for GitHub Copilot’s ‘tips’ in their pull requests, Microsoft has adjusted the coding assistant’s behavior.
An Australian developer was shocked after GitHub Copilot recommended the use of Raycast in a pull request in his name. However, it turned out not to be an isolated incident. Under the guise of ‘tips’, Copilot has been injecting hidden advertisements into developers’ pull requests.
According to Neowin, at least 1.5 million pull requests on GitHub already contain a tip with an advertisement. Usually, Copilot promotes the use of coding agents or integrations with other Microsoft tools, but it is not uncommon for third-party tools to be included as well. Raycast, for example, has reportedly been mentioned in more than 11,000 pull requests.
GitHub backtracks
GitHub is reining in Copilot, but also admits that the advertisements were not unintentional. GitHub Copilot has been placing subtle ads in self-generated pull requests for some time. Microsoft uses the Copilot tips to refer to its own developer ecosystem or to promote integrations with partners.
However, Copilot also began injecting those tips into pull requests by users that were being corrected by the AI assistant, making it appear as if it were advertising on behalf of the users. GitHub considers that a step too far: it announced via X that product tips have been disabled.
This is not the only source of tension between GitHub and developers regarding Copilot. The platform recently announced that it will use Copilot conversations to further train the underlying AI model. This has also met with little approval from GitHub users. AI companies have made significant investments in training models that are far from being recouped. The fact that you as a user ‘pay’ with your data or have to put up with subtle advertising seems increasingly inevitable.
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