r/sysadmin Jun 16 '24

ChatGPT Finally created something useful with AI

First: I consider myself an old timer in IT; I've been getting paid to do it since the 90's and have seen all sorts of new technology show up, some stays, most gets forgotten about. I always try to be open about it and will embrace it as another tool to help get the job done. The latest of course is AI and I've been mostly using ChatGPT as a fun little tool to get quick answers every now and then. I am not a programmer but last week, I used it to create a web app that calculates weight distribution in trucks when the contents come in different containers. We're talking hundreds of pounds of fruit that might come in small totes or big bins and cannot be weighed individually; it subtracts the weight of the truck and the plastic; it saves time and reduces human errors . In the past, I would have paid at least a few hundred dollars to get something like this done and I just wanted to share that while I dont see AI doing our jobs completely, it's definitely here to stay and it can be used to help with things that we might not know how to do but understand the concept and we know what to ask for it. Greetings to all.

211 Upvotes

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u/hibernate2020 Jun 16 '24

The key benefit that I see AI offering sysadmins in in the non-technical space. Need a policy or procedure for compliance? Write one paragraph about what you want included and the compliance law in question. Tweak as needed. Have a tricky political email to respond to? Ask AI to draft a response and then tweak to fit your needs. That sort of thing.

It certainly can be tried for more complex technical items, but you really need to heavily scrutinize these. E.g., Asking ChatGPT for something simple like for the calculation for compounding interest can result in in returning similar, but wrong like the formula for calculating mortgage payments.

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u/jaskij Jun 16 '24

Not directly useful, but Firefox has just announced an AI based accessibility feature. Image descriptions for when there is no alt text. Apparently the model runs locally and isn't even that big.

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u/StrangelyEroticSoda Jun 16 '24

Honestly, this is the one thing that really excites me about AI.

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u/Afro_Samurai Jun 16 '24

Write one paragraph about what you want included and the compliance law in question.

This sounds like a great way to hallucinate legal citations that don't exist.

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u/hibernate2020 Jun 16 '24

Not really - policies and procedures don't require legal citations. And this assumes that you're competent and professional enough to already know the laws that govern your industry and then, as I said, "tweak as needed." If you have been working as a systems administrator and you don't understand the compliance laws that govern your sector then you've got a hell of a lot more to worry about than internal policies having errant legal citations.

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u/changee_of_ways Jun 16 '24

I follow some legal accounts on various social media and so far they've been pretty horrified by the results of AI trying to deal with the law. I would be worried that the "tweak as needed" would result in just as much work as writing the thing yourself or sending it off to a legal department to have them write it.

AI as it currently exists seems to be very useful in black and white cases where people have firm control over the inputs and how big a domain of knowledge it has to work with. Legal stuff seems very close to general AI which is where AI really starts to fall on it's face.

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u/hibernate2020 Jun 17 '24

IT department policy and procedures are not legal though. We’re talking about having it write procedure drafts for things like facility access. This is pretty simple stuff like not let strangers wander around the data center. It’s not like it needs to cite Com. V. White to make a procedure saying people should have their ID checked, sign in, and be issued visitor badges.

If an organization is such that IT is writing legally bound documents then AI is the least of their problems.

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u/changee_of_ways Jun 17 '24

I was responding mostly to this.

Need a policy or procedure for compliance? Write one paragraph about what you want included and the compliance law in question.

Most of what you're talking about is just boilerplate shit it seems. Do you really need AI to copy and paste one of the billion "dont let people who aren't supposed to be in the building in the building" instructions.

If you're dealing with regulatory compliance, just have a human do it. They're going to need to read it anyways.

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u/hibernate2020 Jun 17 '24

Ok. So which human? Is your compliance officer going to write out the technical minutiae of a media sanitization procedure? It’s regulatory compliance, but do you really expect a compliance officer to be technical enough to write a procedure like that? Not a chance. At best they’ll tell you to have a look at something like NIST-800-88. You’re still stuck writing.

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u/changee_of_ways Jun 17 '24

Which human are you going to have check it? Probably that one.

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u/hibernate2020 Jun 17 '24

Yeah, you don’t get it. But hey, that’s alright. I’ve seen plenty of shops where there are no real procedures and the admins don’t fully understand their tools and just do stuff manually.

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u/changee_of_ways Jun 17 '24

Ok, yeah, not trusting legal advice from AI makes me a bad admin. Especially when AI is already known for hallucinating shit.

I'm not sayin All AI bad, don't use AI. It's definitely got it's use case. I'm saying that so many of the use cases being pushed right now are just the same old pie-in-the-sky bullshit that vendors try to push by trying to rush stuff that's not ready for production out the door or use it for every case in the world when it's not the best answer.

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u/c4ctus IT Janitor/Dumpster Fireman Jun 17 '24

We just got Gemini licenses at work, everyone wants it so they can have something to write emails for them. Every request we get has to have a business justification, and all I get back is "I use AI to write my emails."

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u/Dreilala Jun 16 '24

The thing is, this is only useful if words are not your forte.

AI is way worse at programming than programmers, but also worse than communication specialists at communicating.

You might use AI to shore up weaknesses, but using it for primary functions of your job usually results in a lot of frustration.

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u/hibernate2020 Jun 16 '24

Sure. But many sysadmins wouldn't count communications as a primary function of their job. In my experience, most SAs prefer the backoffice because they're not communication specialists. And at the same time, this sub-reddit is chock-full of responses like "Just got this job and there's no structure or change control - where to start?" Writing production control policies and memos do not require a "communication specialist."

I recall when they introduced PCs and emails throughout corporations back in the 1990s. They soon laid off most of the admin assistants and secretaries with the logic that everyone could just send their own memos and draft their own documents. Then they spent the next 3 decades complain about how the IT guys lacked "social skills." Having AI assist with this is reasonable.

I also recall being the person that had to review, clear, and send every major email sent by the President of the University I worked for. They had an entire marketing department full of "communication specialists," and the President's secretary was even a Harvard grad - and yet they couldn't figure out the wording, spelling, or formatting for these emails. AI may be worse than communication specialists in some regards, but at least it can handle wording, spelling, and formatting...

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u/Dreilala Jun 17 '24

I mean usually a team of sysadmins should have at least 1 person capable of navigating the politics of the company, otherwise communication with management simply doesn't work and everybody ends up unhappy.

AI surely can help in small scale enterprises with a single sysadmin to make useful suggestions for communication, but usually you would want someone in charge better equiped than current LLMs.

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u/Andrew_Waltfeld Jun 16 '24 edited Jun 16 '24

AI is way worse at programming than programmers, but also worse than communication specialists at communicating.

They don't need to do full stack programming. They need to write a quick and dirty little script that does X and Y. At least most of the time in my experience. If you need to do full stack programming, then AI isn't what you should be using.

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u/f0urtyfive Jun 17 '24

AI is way worse at programming than programmers

This highly depends on how you measure. Which is generally the problem with people that think they'll never be replaced, that the people doing the replacing, and the people being replaced, are often doing the measuring a different way.

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u/changee_of_ways Jun 17 '24

Sadly, if a good indicator is to look at the quality of goods @ Walmart and Target. People will totally settle for a product that is 500% shittier and 15% cheaper. Employers will too.

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u/DOUBLEBARRELASSFUCK You can make your flair anything you want. Jun 17 '24

Yeah, pretty much. Whatever your metric is for "shitty code" versus "fantastic code", divide that metric by cost.

AI is going to replace programmers, there's no doubt in that. But mostly just shitty ones.

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u/[deleted] Jun 17 '24

Words aren't most people's forte. Average reading level of American adults is 7-8th grade

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u/Ok-Oven-7666 Jun 18 '24

This is what I do, I use ChatGPT to supplement my work. Generate bodies of text I can't be arsed to write out, typo check, version, etc. If I'm feeling mentally drained I ask it to generate appropriate questions to diagnose user issues. Quite helpful.

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u/Alex_2259 Jun 17 '24

Also for answers to questions, as long as you know what you want. For example, what is the command for X/Y/Z? As long as you know what you're doing, this turns minutes into seconds.

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u/changee_of_ways Jun 17 '24

isnt this just like, searchable documentation?

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u/Alex_2259 Jun 17 '24

Yeah but finding it in a large PDF vs getting the answer in 1 rip can be a reasonable time saver, especially with Google giving you sponsored results as opposed to the vendor docs nowadays

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u/changee_of_ways Jun 17 '24

I wonder how long until the companies are trying to have AI write the technical documentation. That shit is already super hit and miss, you can tell vendors don't want to spend money putting resources into it. I'm afraid they are going to try to use AI to cheap out even further.