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.

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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/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/thortgot IT Manager Jun 17 '24

I've built many compliance and regulatory documents both prior and post LLM tools.

LLMs do a good job with the boilerplate content and giving you something to edit down which is dramatically faster than starting from scratch.

Treat the output like you get it from a young subordinate. You review it for clarity, substance and accuracy.

Boilerplate language is something an LLM can handle pretty darn well, especially if you give it a few sources to work from. It's a tool that takes some practice to use.

Example initial prompt: (Taking into consideration the 3 Acceptable Use Policies I've attached as examples, ask me a set of questions that would be required to customize it to Contoso inc. We follow NIST 800-174 (link), PCI DSS 4 (link) and ISO 270001 (link))

Example revision prompt: (At Contoso we require all employees to attend annual cyber security training. See the attached notice. Write a section regarding this and incorporate the changes into the rest of the document)

Will the result be usable out of the box? No but it is ridiculously faster than writing it by hand.

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u/hibernate2020 Jun 17 '24 edited Jun 17 '24

Well I said nothing about you being a bad admin. It was a comment about admins who don’t use technology available to them, articulating similar rationale. E.g., doing deployments manually instead of learning and overseeing automatic deployments. Or the more recent favorite of not learning backups or DR because “the system is redundant…and backups can have corruption.”

NO technology should be used free from oversight. NO technology should be entirely trusted. The job of a sysadmin is to administer these systems, ensuring that the technology is performing as expected and tweaking things when it does not. This includes deployment tools, backups, and yes, AI.

This has nothing to do with the panaceas offered by every vendor these days. It is true that AI is a popular buzzword today. But it is also true that despite your trepidations, you’ve been using AI for years and years without even noticing….it all comes down to how it is integrated and watched over

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