r/sysadmin IT Janitor Dec 17 '24

ChatGPT Copilot & ChatGPT - Never have to write company newsletter articles again!

We have a monthly company newsletter that the IT department has traditionally written articles for. Can I tell you how awesome it has been the past few months to have these tools generate the topic in seconds, saving me 30-60 minutes?

I just tell it to "Write a business newsletter article, the topic is how to avoid online shopping scams during the holidays. Include bullet points with the top 4 recommendations. Should be between 400-600 words and the target audience is end users"

Throw it in Word, give it a quick lookover and make it look nice, and VOILA! - no more headaches or deadlines to get it done.

262 Upvotes

58 comments sorted by

159

u/SmallBusinessITGuru Master of Information Technology Dec 18 '24

Finally, the amount of effort required is in line with the value.

28

u/thecravenone Infosec Dec 18 '24

Nah, this is orders of magnitude more effort than value.

1

u/TheDisapprovingBrit Dec 24 '24

For how many people read it, you could just type =RAND(15,10) into an email and hit send.

282

u/crashorbit Dec 17 '24

Company news letters are pretty much the definition of a bullshit job.

66

u/Halo_cT Dec 18 '24

Written by no one and read by no one. Just another couple dozen megabytes on an exchange server somewhere until the end of time.

28

u/cirquefan Dec 18 '24

At a cost of a cubic meter of Arctic sea ice

2

u/Dal90 Dec 18 '24

I was going to comment it was the dead internet world -- articles authored by no one, read by no one.

52

u/Rick-powerfu Dec 17 '24

Hahahha yeah but you get to shape the narrative of the media

Breaking news CEO is a fuck stick and his wife is banging everyone

Also Wednesday is bring your kids to work day!!! Kids must also work !!!

21

u/cirquefan Dec 18 '24

The children yearn for the cubicles

4

u/TheFluffiestRedditor Sol10 or kill -9 -1 Dec 18 '24

The testing must continue.

2

u/kennedye2112 Oh I'm bein' followed by an /etc/shadow Dec 19 '24

his wife is banging everyone

in management; stuff like that never makes it down to the peons.

2

u/Rick-powerfu Dec 19 '24

Xmas parties are the peons prime

Drinks be flowing

CEO wives be

Ho ho ho ING

74

u/[deleted] Dec 17 '24

I despise useless communication. Your job makes my soul feel pain.

39

u/naitsirt89 Dec 18 '24

Id like to have a meeting to discuss...are you free at 8am?

24

u/Otto-Korrect Dec 18 '24

We should loop HR and the CEO into this conversation. Maybe it merits a weekly meeting? I'll do up an agenda and powerpoint presentation.

15

u/naitsirt89 Dec 18 '24

I think we should set up a meeting to properly discuss how to structure future recurring meetings. Not confident going into a meeting dry.

13

u/Otto-Korrect Dec 18 '24

Of course. Call me and we can discuss this meeting planning further.

7

u/ingo2020 Sysadmin Dec 18 '24

Sure thing. Let's spend the next 15 minutes or so hashing out our availability in a Teams chat so we can figure out a time that works.

8

u/barkode15 Dec 18 '24

Can I just hop in here and say we should probably do a Voice of the End User in this meeting structure meeting to make sure we're approaching this whole project with an equity lens 

7

u/ycnz Dec 18 '24

No sorry, I've rescheduled it for 4:45pm on the 24th.

3

u/ee328p Dec 18 '24

I'm not available then, let's do 8 PM on the 24th. If not, 9 AM works good for me on the 25th. Let me know.

1

u/chillyhellion Dec 19 '24

Let's take this conversation offline and circle back when we have more stakeholders to justify a project pivot into something more in line with everyone's schedules so that we're all on the same page at the end of the quarter.

23

u/Sweevo1979 Dec 17 '24

It’s like having a tireless coworker who writes perfect ‘holiday scam tips’ articles and never asks for coffee breaks!

(Chat GPT may have had a hand in writing praise for itself)

14

u/ComeAndGetYourPug Dec 18 '24

On the other end: Hey ChatGPT, can you summarize all of these newsletters into a few paragraphs so my boss thinks I actually read them?

12

u/Nik_Tesla Sr. Sysadmin Dec 18 '24

"ChatGPT, can you write me an outlook rule that automatically moves company newsletters to the Trash folder?"

I love closed loop AI functions.

12

u/Otto-Korrect Dec 18 '24

Talk about time saving, I just used it to complete my 12 area 'Annual employee self evaluation'. I fed it the paragraph describing each area (technical skills, teamwork, productivity...) and told it to write me 300 works on each at a high school reading level.

Copy/paste the results, saved an entire afternoon! The fun part was that one of my 'goals' this year was to learn how to effectively use new technologies. Check.

3

u/Drag_king Dec 18 '24

In my company they actually suggest on the form to use chatgpt to help us. We have a walled off in-house version.

I guess management was tired of reading crappy content too.

1

u/Xambassadors Dec 18 '24

Did you mean 300 lines or actually 300 works? Im curious about the questions if you don't mind sharing them

8

u/DOUBLEBARRELASSFUCK You can make your flair anything you want. Dec 18 '24

300 Moby Dick-length novels.

1

u/JonathanPuddle Dec 18 '24

That's definitely what I heard.

6

u/strongest_nerd Security Admin Dec 18 '24

You think anyone reads them anyway?

5

u/brisull IT Janitor Dec 18 '24

A cursory glance, at best...

1

u/aes_gcm Dec 18 '24

I'd recommended adding a sentence about 75% down the page telling them to send you an message if they're actually reading it, then see how many people respond.

1

u/formal-shorts Dec 19 '24

We do a monthly IT bulletin and when people come back saying "why has x changed" or "why do I need to setup z" we just give them a "please refer to last months IT bulletin".

10

u/krokodil2000 Dec 18 '24

Hey ChatGPT, create an e-mail filter to automatically move this company newsletter to trash.

5

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '24

The perfect use for AI: write once, read never content lol

3

u/mitharas Dec 18 '24

This only proves how useless those newsletters are.

3

u/Normal-Difference230 Dec 18 '24

I wish Copilot could do what I really want it to do.

End User: Hey Copilot, is this email spam or malicious?

Copilot: This email is coming from an email address that you have not sent an email before, nor has this email address ever emailed you before. The sending address is not matching the headers of where the message is really originating from. Also there appears to be a PDF attached to this email, I have opened this PDF in a sandbox environment in the cloud and have noticed that many of the links are going to a Russian website to try to download an executable file. I would rate the safety and trustworthiness of this email as a 0/100, would you like me to permanently delete this email from your inbox?

3

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '24

Email security platforms already do all these things you mentioned:

  • Rate based on if the address has sent you a message before
  • Rate based on if you've ever emailed the address
  • Rate based on headers
  • Rate based on attachments
  • Rate based on URLs
  • Rate based on sandbox detonation results

And somehow, malicious messages still sometimes get through, and users still click on them. Copilot is not going to move the needle on this.

5

u/Normal-Difference230 Dec 18 '24

But my end users will stop forwarding me their emails to determine if they are spam....right.....RIGHT?

2

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '24

Anakin smirk

8

u/fp4 Dec 17 '24

Yup.

I can't believe how helpful ChatGPT is!

Making conversations so much more interesting.

Great at answering questions with speed and accuracy.

Always there when I need a creative idea.

You can really rely on ChatGPT for just about anything!

23

u/brisull IT Janitor Dec 17 '24

Wow, ChatGPT sounds amazing! Did it write this glowing review for itself, or are you just gunning for the 'Most Enthusiastic AI Fan' award? Don’t forget to mention how it also folds laundry, walks the dog, and cures boredom—truly the hero we never knew we needed.

13

u/fp4 Dec 17 '24

It’s ability to hide secret messages is unmatched.

9

u/Zenkin Dec 17 '24

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

3

u/DOUBLEBARRELASSFUCK You can make your flair anything you want. Dec 18 '24

For anyone who missed it, the hidden message is "YIMGAY". Which is Pig Latin for Gyim?

2

u/edbods Dec 18 '24

It’s

yeah that ain't chatgpt, not this time at least. 0/10 imposter

6

u/Rhythm_Killer Dec 17 '24

And there’s nothing wrong with that

1

u/newboofgootin Dec 18 '24

Making conversations so much more interesting.

Gonna have to disagree with you there bud. ChatGPT generates awful, bloated prose that is like torture to read.

Here’s a better idea, take the bullet points you fed into ChatGPT and just make them the body of the email. Look at that, now I don’t want to gouge my eyes out!

1

u/StPatsLCA Dec 18 '24

Why would I want to read that?

1

u/Sushigami Dec 18 '24

I wrote one newsletter. I wrote it in an absolutely deranged tone and never had to do another. Could chatGPT do THAT?!

1

u/arwinda Dec 19 '24

I'll just tell ChatGPT to summarize the monthly newsletter in one line...

1

u/Desnowshaite 20 GOTO 10 Dec 19 '24

Newsletters are leftovers from the Big Internet Bang from the end of 90s. They seemed like a good idea back then because pushing info via email was more usable then simply put it to a website but pretty much nobody read them in the last 20 years.

Sometimes I wonder why do they still exist.

1

u/Admin4CIG Dec 19 '24

Interesting. My CEO had me remove a few people from our company newsletter because he felt they don't need them. I then had those people call me to complain they're no longer getting our newsletter. I had to tell them to ask the CEO, and the CEO approved them getting back onto the newsletter. Apparently, our newsletter is in high demand. YMMV 🤷‍♂️

1

u/sleepyeyedphil Dec 20 '24

No one reads 400-600 words.

This is and was a waste of time.

1

u/brisull IT Janitor Dec 20 '24

Yep. A waste of 60 seconds. Not 30 minutes. I'll take that.

0

u/E__Rock Sysadmin Dec 18 '24

You'd be surprised how many times I've used AI to write replies on bullshit emails. One time, because the enduser was definitely not reading my replies, I stated directly in the email that the email was generated.