An interesting discovery was made as it relates to OpenAI Codex and its system prompt. From this article:
The system prompt for OpenAI’s Codex CLI contains a perplexing and repeated warning for the most recent GPT model to “never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.”
There is more in that article worth reading, but I had a light bulb go off in my head when I read about what the system prompt said to never talk about. The suspicion is that the system prompt was needed due to topics being mentioned too often. Did AI scrape too many D&D sessions or fantasy books? We may never know. Regardless, the Codex warning made me think of nefariously making references to sway Github Copilot responses in SSMS.
With SSMS 22.3 or later, you can create a Constitution.md extended property so that GitHub Copilot can have the query standards and business standards that fit your business. That is a great feature to have and can prove itself useful.
But imagine using it to prank someone who doesn’t know about this Constitution feature. Perhaps we want every response to reference things like goblins, gremlins, raccoons, etc.
If we ask Copilot a generic question like, “Create a table with 10 records of example data for characters,” then it goes straight to the constitution for more guidance:
If you have a safe environment where harmless Constitution changes could be made and a good relationship with your coworker, there might be some April Fool’s Day potential. Sure, it’s limited and easy to catch (as the Copilot response tells you it’s looking at the database constitution), but still, worth a shot to get a good laugh.
Thanks for reading!
Chad Callihan 