I'm torn between wanting to opt-out because it's morally correct, or remaining opted-in so I can poison AI models with my terrible code.
You're using copilot??
No, you don't have to use it for it to take your code for training.
so I can poison AI models with my terrible code.
Don't forget to teach it obscenities and yell at it whenever it fucks something up!
Nah, guarantee the models have rules built in to deal with obvious stuff like that.
You need to be more subtle. Give them information that is slightly wrong.
Not to be too snarky, but was there ever an assumption that stuff you put in wasn't being used to train it? Safe to assume that any online service you're using is making use of the data you're giving it.
If you’re a business with a contract with them it should state that they won’t use your data to train their models.
If you’re using the free service then you’re right that it’s safe to assume that your data was already being used.
business with a contract
I always wonder at this and have cautioned my managers repeatedly. Yes, we have a contract, but they have a literal army of lawyers and we have less (one lawyer one retainer for hourly work or a small grouping focused on taxes and employment law). As if our ownership won't bend over backwards to avoid suing a large company like Google, AWS, Microsoft, or Oracle. (Maybe OpenAI and Anthropic are sue-able by a $100 million corp?)
As proof I offer the lawsuits between businesses that have proceeded far enough the general public has heard about them. Not a specific one, just all of them.
Link for opting out: https://github.com/settings/copilot/features
In the "Privacy" section, set "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training" to "Disabled".
fun fact, if you've ever accidentally clicked the "enable" button on copilot because you're a dumbass who can't read, you get a shitton of more settings, most of which are locked to "enabled".
Even more fun fact, if you never clicked the "enable" button on Copilot, most of those settings are locked to "enabled" anyway.
yeah you just can't see them. fun!
Yes I just found that this morning. Time to seriously look at the GitHub alternatives.
Also another setting under CoPilot>Coding Agent - turn off for All Repositories - mine was set to On.
Opted Out and moved all to codeberg
How is codeberg?
Got this email last night and felt validated for never uploading any code to GitHub because I don’t trust Microsoft. lol I don’t have any big coding projects, but I self-host a ForgeJo server in my mini rack at home behind a Twingate VPN.
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