Over Fifteen Years Later, Microsoft Morged My Diagram
canopic jug writes:
Over 15 years ago software engineer, Vincent Driessen, had published a mighty fine, illustrated explanation of Git branching only to find that recently Microsoft used its AI to not just plagiarize it but misrepresent it.
In 2010, I wrote A successful Git branching model and created a diagram to go with it. I designed that diagram in Apple Keynote, at the time obsessing over the colors, the curves, and the layout until it clearly communicated how branches relate to each other over time. I also published the source file so others could build on it. That diagram has since spread everywhere: in books, talks, blog posts, team wikis, and YouTube videos. I never minded. That was the whole point: sharing knowledge and letting the internet take it by storm!
What I did not expect was for Microsoft, a trillion-dollar company, some 15+ years later, to apparently run it through an AI image generator and publish the result on their official Learn portal, without any credit or link back to the original.
The AI rip-off was not just ugly. It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition, to put it gently. Microsoft unworthy. The carefully crafted visual language and layout of the original, the branch colors, the lane design, the dot and bubble alignment that made the original so readable-all of it had been muddled into a laughable form. Proper AI slop.
Previously:
(2025) The Drunken Plagiarists: Working with Co-pilots
(2024) Blocking AI Bots From Microsoft, Others Has Been "Pain in the a**": Reddit CEO
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