"15+ years later, Microsoft morged my diagram," engineer Vincent Driessen wrote on his blog Wednesday. If you saw the word "morged" and started sweating that you're behind on internet slang again, don't worry—it is in fact not a word, but rather some AI slop that Microsoft published on its Learn portal, in its official explainer on how to use Github. More specifically, it's slop from an AI-generated graphic that plagiarized a chart Driessen published on his blog more than a decade ago.
"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," Driessen explained in today's post. It was a useful chart, and he made the source files available so others could freely use and modify it, which they did, across years of technical talks, wikis and videos.
