A software engineer is calling out Microsoft for posting an “AI rip-off” of diagram he created 15 years ago—only Microsoft’s version contains some embarrassing typos.
Vincent Driessen chastised the software giant on Wednesday after users noticed a curious diagram on a Microsoft Learn website devoted to teaching developers technical skills. The page covers the basics of GitHub, a developer platform that Microsoft owns, and includes a seemingly professional-looking diagram to visualize a “Git flow” concerning software releases.
However, a caption in the diagram merges two made-up words. “Bugfixes from rel, branch may be continvoucly morged back into develop,” it says. The diagram also misspells Time as “Tim” and seems to convolute some of the branches.
Users on Bluesky spotted the diagram and eventually flagged it to Driessen, who quipped: “Oh god yes, Microsoft continvoucly morged my diagram there for sure 😬.”
Microsoft’s diagram is on the left, Driessen’s original is on the right. “Arrows missing and pointing in the wrong direction, and the obvious ‘continvoucly morged’ text quickly gave it away as a cheap AI artifact,” he wrote. (Credit: Microsoft/Driessen)
In a blog post, Driessen explained that 15 years ago he created the diagram that Microsoft’s AI image seems to have largely copied. Except his diagram used proper human language that says “Bugfixes from rel. (release) branch may be continuously merged back into develop.”
Driessen says the AI-created diagram has left him surprised and saddened. “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,” he adds. “It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition, to put it gently. Microsoft unworthy.”
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He also faults Redmond for failing to proof-read the image. “What’s dispiriting is the (lack of) process and care: take someone’s carefully crafted work, run it through a machine to wash off the fingerprints, and ship it as your own,” he added. “This isn’t a case of being inspired by something and building on it. It’s the opposite of that. It’s taking something that worked and making it worse. Is there even a goal here beyond ‘generating content?'”
Microsoft didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But the company has since deleted the diagram from Microsoft Learn page. The incident occurs as Redmond has been championing artificial intelligence and its Copilot chatbot all the while facing user gripes about AI replacing human workers, creating software bloat, and unleashing AI slop.
In the meantime, Driessen fears similar incidents will pop up. “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,” he wrote.
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