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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