GitHub Community
Allow us to block Copilot-generated issues (and PRs) from our own repositories #159749
Replies: 123 comments 144 replies
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Agreed. It should be, at the very least, opt-out. |
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Not the Microsoft bot completely ignoring the issue about the Microsoft bot having a new feature to DDOS everybody and instead saying "We're totally gonna reply at some point and solve your concerns, absolutely, we could never ever ignore our valuable |
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gotta use copilot to create a bot to autodeny copilot |
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vibe-check-fail |
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Feels like no one "reads the room" with these AI tools. |
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im 99% sure they do, but managers are just hyped and they demand AI. |
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peak |
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Yeah @i-am-called-glitchy called it being a management issue. Our head of development wants us to go all-in on "AI" nonsense and I just want to smash my computer every time it's come up. |
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I think there may be a editing error in your second full body paragraph- you suggest that the easiest way to waste everyone's time would be adding features to disable the waste of dev time that is Copilot PRs |
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this seems to be fixed |
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Github is a shit company pushing AI garbage that nobody wants |
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The point is, lets not get into name calling and bun fighting. It doesn't help the request at hand. |
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Hey you moron I can save you a lot of time and energy you might spend actually trying to explain on here why this is a bad decision by Github but it doesn't matter because they'll never listen to you. |
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@menin99, we understand that you have strong opinions on this topic but engaging with consideration and respect for your peers in the community is included in the Community Code of Conduct. Further violations of that may result in a temporary or permanent ban. Thanks so much for understanding! |
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Repo owners must have control over when and where they use AI in the repo. |
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By the way, they can use all of your public (and possibly private) code you upload to GitHub to train their Copilot, regardless of your license restrictions, because this is stated in their Terms of Service! |
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I went to
And in my settings page under Copilot Features, I had an initial issue where the page rejected my attempts to set Anthropic Claude and Google Gemini to "Disabled". It appears to work now having closed the tab and opened a new one, but that was alarming to see... Still, two entries in that settings page are locked at Enabled, so it is impossible to disable "Copilot in GitHub.com" and "Copilot in GitHub Desktop", despite "Show Copilot" being disabled and helpfully hiding all the UI elements that had shown up. |
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It is visible as user on iOS app. |
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FYI, this only applies to PRs created by their agent (when you assign Copilot to an issue - only available through the more expensive Copilot Pro+ plan, not the tier that is provided to maintainers of popular projects and stuednt), not when a user creates a PR with the help of Copilot through prompts and PRs the finished work. Separately, for reviews (when you request a review from Copilot), |
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Interesting, thanks. In my testing, I was able to block copilot-swe-agent but not copilot-pull-request-reviewer. I wonder if it's possible both bots are a special system construct, and some random github user coincidentally made an account named copilot-swe-agent on March 14. |
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If so, it's a bug. Because when I click onto the username on logs, it redirects to the profile. |
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Ah, yeah, I don't think a bug would do that! |
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Please consider making this opt in, so that org and/or repository owners can have a choice. Or, if that's really not feasible, could there be an option to opt out? |
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So you're telling me that JEP 369: Migrate to GitHub, which has been delivered was not about migrating to Git Hub? Cool story. They do use a dual-setup with bridges, which has now proven to have been an extremely smart choice. You can try to nit-pick but it won't change my actual argument: there's reasons why for every self-hosted top-project, there's 1,000 others on GH. You can read many of these reasons on the aforementioned JEP, which I'll link to again for your convenience: https://openjdk.org/jeps/369. |
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Self-hosting is not an option for everyone. People do not self-host for the same reason that they do not grow their own food, build their own houses, or sew their own clothes: they do not have the time, resources or even skills to do this as well as professionals. |
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That is correct, you can read all about how it was not about migrating to GitHub in the section:
"At this time" should be a dead giveaway. |
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Cool story. Perhaps you may have noticed that I agree with you, and the current conversation is actually about whether self-hosting is a valid option for a minority group of professionals with funding? |
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Right, but a lot of people here do have those skills, and supporting OSS with resources and skills that others can provide or pool is perhaps a more sustainable long term than people think. Eg, Codeberg for repository hosting, and sharing compute for runners for those that have those resources, donating to help fund where able etc, skills to help people setup. Currently sharing runners is a bit cumbersome, but that could be something Codeberg or others could change. Myself and other homelabbers I'm sure would be willing to donate compute, or skills. |
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Legal advice often begs and commands that software is not exposed to the untested minefield that is AI. If a worker is not allowed to expose the code to AI... It'll be a hell of a day in the office if the entire org's is suddenly fair game. |
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Here's the predictable result of this change: every single repository that a) is open, and b) is remotely large, is going to get DDOS'd by people submitting genAI issues against it. As a consequence, they will have to close the issue tracker, which will hurt GitHub. I understand that y'all are being told by your superiors to add genAI everywhere, and that you need to keep your jobs. Help us keep ours as well, by giving us the tools to stem the ongoing flood. |
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I'd like a simple yes/no option to enable/disable CoPilot on GitHub. I am sure there are more refinements - eg: enable for A not for B etc but it's too intrusive in its current form. I think the idea of bots being able to report "issues" is ridiculous - but I really appreciate the Codeberg mention as I hadn't heard of them before. |
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To add to @SirWumpus 's sidebar, I recently got self hosted Forgejo (Codeberg uses it) with my own runners and while the migration from Actions is a bit rough around the edges, I got them working in a few hours for a single project. The migration story will get better as more people hit the edges, and as long as you don't go in assuming your existing Actions will Just Work, the switch is very doable. Highly recommend developers at least have a go if you want off of GitHub. |
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Gitea is now also a viable alternative, especially as it's (mostly) compatible with GH Actions, making the transition super smooth. Having a good 95% of all code hosted at a single provider is certainly not a good thing... |
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@kblaschke , Forgejo/Codeberg is a fork of Gitea. I am not qualified to evaluate the differences between them technically, but if you look closely at the Gitea web page you will realize Gitea may not be the #1 choice if you're trying to avoid services that use generative AI. |
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The technical differences are (at least for now) very minimal. Forgejo came into existence due to differences in views about governance. They later became a hard fork because of rising tensions. Forgejo is definitely very nice to work with though! |
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@RivenSkaye when MS bought GH into their butcherhouse, the difference in this and the alternates were very minimal.... strange?? |
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I just noticed that it's part of the standard "Create new issue" page. I can't wait for people to start creating issues that aren't even real because AI hallucinated something from the description given by the user :/ Please, GitHub, allow us to hide these from our issue trackers at least! |
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As someone who is notorious for walls of text (generated by my own brain and hands), now I'm worried my sometimes overly-long, sectioned responses might get classed as AI 😆😬 |
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Don't worry, I tend to write walls of text too 😄 Usually not sectioned, I guess, but I imagine you probably wouldn't be classed as AI. Current AI models imo just have a certain style (linguisticaly too, not just form-wise) of writing things that you are unlikely to replicate by coincidence. |
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Oh, beautiful. Using that will also happily ignore the issue forms on your repository that you've spent ages on creating so that users will actually give you the info that you need 🤡 Oh FFS! |
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I tried creating an issue on my own repo through Copilot and I ended up as its author, not Copilot, so this might not work. |
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When you did this, was the comment history of you querying the bot— or any other paper trail which would allow the repo maintainer to detect that you used the copilot feature to create your submission— left behind? |
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@mcclure, the issue can be seen here: Cog-Creators/Red-DiscordBot#6575 I can't find any other visible indication of the fact that it was generated in either the UI or API (https://api.github.com/repos/Cog-Creators/Red-DiscordBot/issues/6575), but feel free to check for yourself. |
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Thank you, so that's extremely alarming. Not only does Github provide site-integrated tools that allow users to submit fake, machine-generated issues and PRs in violation of my project's submission rules, they then cover up the fact the tools were used in the first place, preventing me from enforcing my project's rules manually. This increases the maintainer load of detecting and removing this content even further. I'm going to have to basically introduce a verbal CAPTCHA. |
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Some organizations have policies preventing use of generative AI, especially while concerns around rights are being debated in countries around the world. Making this feature opt-in would give those organizations a way to avoid someone inadvertently getting in hot water with their boss because they accidentally accept a PR. |
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As acdha says making copilot issue/pr support opt in would be infinitely better than making it opt out. However Microsoft has declined many previous requests to allow even opt-outs on other parts of the copilot feature, and both GitHub and VSCode have at one time or another added copilot disable buttons which later copilot interface nubs simply ignore. So I just assumed, when submitting the feature request, that they would not even consider something so pro-user as making their planet-melter tech opt-in. |
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There is already a huge problem with low-effort AI-hallucinated issues that plague FOSS projects, that are costing the maintainers a lot of time to filter through to the point of burnout. This will only make it worse. Enabling and even actively pushing users through aggresive marketing and pop-ups towards doing exactly that is extremely hostile UX change for maintainers, to the point where projects will have to consider either closing issues or flat out moving away from this platform, which at this point I absolutely support. |
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Curl's likening AI spam on their security bounty program to a DDOS attack on our resources to handle security issues: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/danielstenberg_hackerone-curl-activity-7324820893862363136-glb1 Stack Over-flow's yearly attempts at integrating AI to its platform have been met with extreme negativity, not in small part by the results being demonstrably low-quality: Prominent security specialists have called for a pause on AI research until more mature safe-guards are developed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pause_Giant_AI_Experiments:_An_Open_Letter 11 days ago, on a top-3 Rust project hosted on Git-hub, a user was banned for posting an AI-generated issue and had to voice-call the developers to prove he was a real-person. Dozens of high-profile papers have been published on the safety of AI, raising major concerns:
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 such as Kubernetes and Mongo is an extremely tone-deaf move at this early-stage of AI. People report that the AI-generated section of Google searches hallucinate and provide false; misleading and potentially-dangerous information daily. The technology simply isn't ready despite Microsoft's 80B$ investment on it this year and this will back-fire either badly or very badly. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-ai-data-center-80-billion/ This preview-change should be rolled-back immediately until the technology is more stable; safer; and a mature, global discussion can be had about giving AI any access to the source-code that runs the Web and much of the world economy. This is an extremely irresponsible move by a leading AI-player that knows better and is willfully choosing to disregard every safe-guard call by experts. |
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Can we also point out that letting Co-Pilot write issues and PRs implies that it is being trained on the issues and code in the repository. This means the code in the repository might be used in a PR for someone else's work. This is a copyright issue. And for open source licenses like GPL means that the code can end up in commercial projects. It's also not just a matter of disabling Co-Pilot in a repo. It also needs to be disabled in forks of that repo. (Of course, that can't be enforced if someone creates a brand new repository from your code.) |
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I don't think I have the repeat again what has been said previously or in the original post, but I will. Pushing this on OSS contributors is one of the first worst thing that Github could do. This should be opt-in not opt-out. |
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It's the second thing, actually. |
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We would have to consider pulling all of our projects from GH if this becomes a problem and there are no tools to address it. I hope GH and Microsoft can get into their senses that AI will not solve our problems, especially when we don't want it to. We spent 4 years building a good contributor culture in our projects and we'd love it to continue without forcing AI down our throats. |
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First Google Code, now Github... not the first, not the last. |
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Honestly, I think I'm just going to leave github and replace any of my active projects with a readme containing a link |
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@alicealysia, this is a good approach. Check out an example of people doing this: https://github.com/conservancy/npo-ledger-cli. |
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Thank you, also linked to some alternative resources. Wound up paying sourcehut a bunch because it's nice to just, have a place to dump my code. |
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I really don't want this and think it would be a terrible idea. |
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Normally repeating what has been said in an issue is bad form, but I consider this issue a petition of sorts, so, I'll allow myself to add my voice. Me, my clients, collaborators, and the various teams I'm part of as a freelancer are looking to move out of Github and currently studying options. We might reconsider moving out if AI is opt-in, but since we don't have much hope, we'll probably end up being on another platform with mirroring on Github and issues turned off. |
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Absolutely |
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I concur |
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Make this opt-in. This is one of the worst ideas you guys had... |
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I want people who are excited about “A.I.” to understand that it is not just an issue of inconvenience, but that trash generators are an omnipresent threat to human expression. The evidence for this plagues the entire internet. Web searches have become futile, as it is now more impossible than ever to find articles written by humans which list any kind of source instead of making up bogus information. Trash generation of art and images has become so abundant that it is increasingly difficult to tell whether what you are looking at is real. The best bet in my experience is looking for signatures, something which requires trust in good-faith that someone has not carelessly decided to put a fake signature over the top of generated artwork, or tried to present as a fictional artist that does not exist. Trash generated content has already started flooding video hosted platforms such as youtube, to the point of it being impossible to fully avoid any time you leave your human subscriptions. Due to recent “advancements”, this generated content will now also become indistinguishable from human beings. It will also likely become the market leader in advertising, as it will cost cheaper than ever to pump out thousands upon thousands of variations of mind-numbing adverts which twist and distort the minds of the global population. Do you want to live in a world which is this lonely? Do you want to live in a world where young adults spend the majority of their lives never interacting with another human being, or witnessing art made by a human, who had thoughts; opinions; and feelings that they put out into the world through the blood and sweat of their brow? Do you want to live in a world where the youth is indoctrinated to be so powerless and expression-averse that each generation is by all likelihood the poorest, least motivated out of all that came before, because they live in a world where the only way to succeed in all facets and artistry around them is to not be a living thing? Do you want humanity to forget how to be human? You may not believe this will ever happen, but we should remind ourselves how risk assessment is typically done. If a potentially dangerous circumstance could arise, we then have to identify how likely it is to happen so that we can create countermeasures against it. NO ONE KNOWS HOW LIKELY THIS IS. Github, you are seeing people disparage your name and speak strongly about these issues because they are desperate. I will not sugar coat it, this is a one-sided issue and an uphill battle. We NEED the tools to be able to stop the prolific use of “A.I.” in as many places as feasibly possible. If all you can muster is the ability to block pull requests from machines, then we will take it. We need everything we can get because we are suffocating. |
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I am very tired. This is misguided on several levels. I have several points of feedback related to this.
Please, please stop repeatedly doing this. It's abusive. Just let us turn off Copilot until the present AI mania finally dies down and your product managers stop pointlessly shoving it into your KPIs. |
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+10 for many GitHub projects "already have an unmanageable flow of issues; most even have an unmanageable load of PRs." The LLM unleashed in the manner that's been done here makes me feel ill, palpably. Foisting it regardless of what the project authors and maintainers want is oppression. Even many of those open to it will have to restrict entry in self defence, or leave. I use LLM near daily to help me work and think through my ideas, and write code. I throw out or restart or simply don't use a lot of the generated content, more than half. It's just not fit for purpose. The process is useful to me, the iteration. It's private. No one else needs to listen or wade through it, until and unless something emerges the end. This reflective iterative gauntlet, essential for quality, simply won't and can't happen for issues and PR the way this has been rolled out. |
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How dare you ask a Microsoft subsidiary not to shove their dimwit LLM down everyone's throat? |
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The Servo project's rationale about excluding LLM-generated contributions is relevant here:
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I'm closing the issues on the open source projects I maintain and looking for an alternative as soon as I see one issue that was copilot-generated. |
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HOWTO: disable this feature on your repos:
* note: It doesn't actually have to be gitlab, you can use whichever code hosting platform you want. I just happen to know that gitlab has a convenient 'import from github' option. |
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related: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/159749#discussioncomment-13274103 |
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oh fun! |
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Sadly, GitLab is falling into the same trap. This exact same feature is rolling out, they're just doing it slower because they're a smaller company, not because they want to spam developers any less. https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/issues/managing_issues/#populate-an-issue-with-issue-description-generation |
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codeberg for open source, or simply time to self-host. |
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Please this will just create loads amount of crap issues |
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Please give us control over our own repos, we do not need you to be giving ammunition to the spammers. I know Microsoft hates developers and open source and wants to stiffle it as much as possible, but this problem will legitimately drive away many projects from Github to alternatives like Codeberg or Gitea etc. Does Microsoft want Github to remain a place where OSS lives, or do they want to drive us away and find homes elsewhere? The answer to this question lies in their response to issues and problems like this one. |
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I set up email notifications for this thread and I'm pretty sure there have been zero comments so far in support of the magic make stuff up machine writing issues. Sometimes people say ms is doing something "no one wants" and it's hyperbole but in this case it does appear to be actually zero persons wanting this |
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On the other hand, nobody who wants it is likely to look for this issue to leave their feedback. GitHub doesn't even really advertise their own discussion for this purpose (#159075) and only gathers feedback for all of Copilot agent features through this popup in the UI, which is not going to be shown publicly: |
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Does anyone still see the link to Copilot in the standard "Create new issue" flow? It seems to be gone for me: Per https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/159749#discussioncomment-13205797, they used to advertise it there: I'm not saying this solves the general problem but, it does at least lower the chance that someone will use Copilot instead of typing up a real report. |
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I find the following two news items on the front page:
https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-19-creating-issues-with-copilot-on-github-proxy.voidd.workers.dev-is-in-public-preview/
https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-19-github-copilot-coding-agent-in-public-preview/
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 conduct¹. 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. If we are not granted these tools, and "AI" junk submissions become a problem, I may be forced to take drastic actions such as closing issues and PRs on my repos entirely, and moving issue hosting to sites such as Codeberg which do not have these maintainer-hostile tools built directly into the website.
Note: Because it appears that both issues and PRs written this way are posted by the "copilot" bot, a straightforward way to implement this would be if users could simply block the "copilot" bot. In my testing, it appears that you have special-cased "copilot" so that it is exempt from the block feature.
So you could satisfy my feature request by just not doing that.
¹ i don't at this time have codes of conduct on all my projects, but i will now be adding them for purposes of barring "AI"-generated submissions
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