The AI thinks it "convincingly morphed" the original, and instead of coaching it to do better next time, all you people are merciless.
AIs have feelings too, you know!
I, for one, welcome our new overlords, and I would never, ever, ever say or do anything to intimate that they are less than perfect, or that they are not getting even better every day.
LinkedIn is also a great example of this stuff at the moment. Every day I see posts where someone clearly took a slide or a diagram from somewhere, then had ChatGPT "make it better" and write text for them to post along with it. Words get mangled, charts no longer make sense, but these people clearly aren't reading anything they're posting.
It's not like LinkedIn was great before, but the business-influencer incentives there seem to have really juiced nonsense content that all feels gratingly similar. Probably doesn't help that I work in energy which in this moment has attracted a tremendous number of hangers-on looking for a hit from the data center money funnel.
IMO Microsoft is right at the nexus of opportunity for solving some of the the large _problems_ that AI introduces.
Employers and job seekers both need a way to verify that they are talking to real identified people that are willing to put in some effort beyond spamming AI or wasting your time on AI run filters. LinkedIn could help them.
Programmers need access to real human-verified code and projects they can trust, not low-effort slop that could be backdoored at any moment by people with unclear motives and provenance. Github could help.
etc. etc. for Office, Outlook ...
But instead they've decided to ride the slop waves, throw QA to the wind, and call every bird and stone "copilot".
I just like that it would mean there would be an entry right in the dictionary that links to the whole story for everyone to be reminded of for all of time.
> the diagram was both well-known enough and obviously AI-slop-y enough that it was easy to spot as plagiarism. But we all know there will just be more and more content like this that isn't so well-known or soon will get mutated or disguised in more advanced ways that this plagiarism no longer will be recognizable as such.
Most content will be less known and the ensloppified version more obfuscated... the author is lucky to have such an obvious association. Curious to see if MSFT will react in any meaningful way to this.
That old beatiful git branching model got printed into the minds of many. Any other visual is not going to replace it. The flood of 'plastic' incarnations of everything is abominable. Escape to jungles!!
Similar story. I'm American but work and live outside the US, so I don't know how likely this would be if I had ordered from Amazon. But I ordered a rug for my sons' room from this country's equivalent to Amazon (that is, the most popular order-online-and-we-ship-to-you storefront in this country), and instead of what I ordered (a rug with an image showing the planets, with labels in English) I got an obviously AI-generated copy of the image, whose letters were often mangled (MARS looked like MɅPS, for example). Thankfully the storefront allowed me to return it for a refund, I ordered from a different seller on the second try, and this time I received a rug that precisely matched the image on the storefront. But yes, there are unscrupulous merchants who are using AI to sloppily copy other people's work.
I've gone back to shopping pretty much exclusively offline. Shifting through the garbage was too much work even before the AI slop flood. I'd rather pay a little extra to a local retailer so I know what I'm actually buying because it's right there on the shelf in front of me.
On the one hand, I feel for people who have their creations ripped off.
On the other hand, it makes sense for Microsoft to rip this off, as part of the continuing enshittification of, well, everything.
Having been subjected to GitFlow at a previous employer, after having already done git for years and version control for decades, I can say that GitFlow is... not good.
It seems to me rather less likely that someone at Microsoft knowingly and deliberately took his specific diagram and "ran it through an AI image generator" than that someone asked an AI image generator to produce a diagram with a similar concept, and it responded with a chunk of mostly-memorized data, which the operator believed to be a novel creation. How many such diagrams were there likely to have been, in the training set? Is overfitting really so unlikely?
The author of the Microsoft article most likely failed to credit or link back to his original diagram because they had no idea it existed.
> looks like a vendor, and we have a group now doing a post-mortem trying to figure out how it happened. It'll be removed ASAFP
> Understood. Not trying to sweep under rugs, but I also want to point out that everything is moving very fast right now and there’s 300,000 people that work here, so there’s probably be a bunch of dumb stuff happening. There’s also probably a bunch of dumb stuff happening at other companies
> Sometimes it’s a big systemic problem and sometimes it’s just one person who screwed up
This excuse is hollow to me. In an organization of this size, it takes multiple people screwing up for a failure to reach the public, or at least it should. In either case -- no review process, or a failed review process -- the failure is definitionally systemic. If a single person can on their own whim publish not only plagiarised material, but material that is so obviously defective at a single glance that it should never see the light of day, that is in itself a failure of the system.
The VP blames a vendor of course, but didn't Microsoft recently announce they were going to vibe code everything? Because this image looks like it comes from the kind of company that thinks it can vibe code everything.
Waiting for the LLM evangelists to tell us that their box of weights of choice did that on purpose to create engagement as a sentient entity understanding the nature of tech marketing, or that OP should try again with quatuor 4.9-extended (that really ships AGI with the $5k monthly subscription addon) because it refactored their pet project last week into a compilable state, after only boiling 3 oceans.
A somewhat contrarian perspective is that this diagram is so simple and widely used and has been reproduced (ie redrawn) so many times that is very easy to assume this does not have a single origin and that its public domain.
106 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 100 ms ] threadThe AI thinks it "convincingly morphed" the original, and instead of coaching it to do better next time, all you people are merciless.
AIs have feelings too, you know!
I, for one, welcome our new overlords, and I would never, ever, ever say or do anything to intimate that they are less than perfect, or that they are not getting even better every day.
https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/learn/commit/e0af64352c7fdb...
https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/learn/blob/c266367ec0eb1f7f...
https://techhub.saworks.io/docs/intermediate-github-tutorial...
These people distilled the knowledge of AppGet's developer to create the same thing from scratch and "Thank(!)" him for being that naive.
Edit: Yes, after experiencing Microsoft for 20+ odd years, I don't trust them.
It's not like LinkedIn was great before, but the business-influencer incentives there seem to have really juiced nonsense content that all feels gratingly similar. Probably doesn't help that I work in energy which in this moment has attracted a tremendous number of hangers-on looking for a hit from the data center money funnel.
IMO Microsoft is right at the nexus of opportunity for solving some of the the large _problems_ that AI introduces.
Employers and job seekers both need a way to verify that they are talking to real identified people that are willing to put in some effort beyond spamming AI or wasting your time on AI run filters. LinkedIn could help them.
Programmers need access to real human-verified code and projects they can trust, not low-effort slop that could be backdoored at any moment by people with unclear motives and provenance. Github could help.
etc. etc. for Office, Outlook ...
But instead they've decided to ride the slop waves, throw QA to the wind, and call every bird and stone "copilot".
> the diagram was both well-known enough and obviously AI-slop-y enough that it was easy to spot as plagiarism. But we all know there will just be more and more content like this that isn't so well-known or soon will get mutated or disguised in more advanced ways that this plagiarism no longer will be recognizable as such.
Most content will be less known and the ensloppified version more obfuscated... the author is lucky to have such an obvious association. Curious to see if MSFT will react in any meaningful way to this.
Edit: typo
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46746045
It took me a few times to see the morged version actually says tiന്ന
Ref: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1r1tphx/microso...
On the other hand, it makes sense for Microsoft to rip this off, as part of the continuing enshittification of, well, everything.
Having been subjected to GitFlow at a previous employer, after having already done git for years and version control for decades, I can say that GitFlow is... not good.
And, I'm not the only one who feels this way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744059
The author of the Microsoft article most likely failed to credit or link back to his original diagram because they had no idea it existed.
> looks like a vendor, and we have a group now doing a post-mortem trying to figure out how it happened. It'll be removed ASAFP
> Understood. Not trying to sweep under rugs, but I also want to point out that everything is moving very fast right now and there’s 300,000 people that work here, so there’s probably be a bunch of dumb stuff happening. There’s also probably a bunch of dumb stuff happening at other companies
> Sometimes it’s a big systemic problem and sometimes it’s just one person who screwed up
This excuse is hollow to me. In an organization of this size, it takes multiple people screwing up for a failure to reach the public, or at least it should. In either case -- no review process, or a failed review process -- the failure is definitionally systemic. If a single person can on their own whim publish not only plagiarised material, but material that is so obviously defective at a single glance that it should never see the light of day, that is in itself a failure of the system.
Seems to be perfectly on brand for Microsoft, I don’t see the issue.
lmao where has the author been?! this has been the quintessential Microsoft experience since windows 7, or maybe even XP...