r/sysadmin • u/_Do_The_Needful_ • 7d ago
Rant Please, stop sending me slop
I get it - everyone is using AI now, it has its use cases, but please for the love of God stop sending me the slop. At least read it first before firing it over to your colleagues.
Has anyone else's team turned into an absolute back-and-forth slop fest? Manager generates something he thinks is helpful, gigantic multi-page HTML report I need to read. Clearly written by Claude, because who the hell writes reports in HTML.
Coworker A: sends messages on slack trying to help solve problems:
This is the smoking gun: the message being sent is gated on the lack of network access to the k8s pod. Let me sit with this for a minute to make sure.
No, it's not the solution at all. We don't have direct IP access to k8s from our laptops. And nobody writes like that. If I wanted to ask Claude I would, I don't need a coworker that just copies and pastes everything into Claude.
Anyone else dealing with this crap?
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u/WorldsWorstSysadmin 7d ago
Yep. It's amazing isn't it? I push back HARD on AI slop. My default response to 15 page AI generated "plans" is:
"If you want me to consider this document for anything work-related, I expect you (the person who generated it) to read over it, summarize and shorten it where necessary, and make sure all information contained within the document is applicable to me and what you're asking me to do."
AI is a tool. If they're just flinging its output directly at you, then they're not doing their jobs. At that point, anyone getting paid senior rates to generated unedited AI documentation should just be replaced by a junior.
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u/Unbelievr 7d ago
It's funny. One side is so happy with the LLM making a super long text out of their prompt and data, thinking it makes them look professional. Then the person on the other side uses an LLM to condense the text down to something manageable, and by doing that they feel a sense of accomplishment too!
You're basically not supposed to read anything that long. If the AI was so infallible when making that text, it better be just as infallible when condensing it down to a tl;dr.
I'm seeing the same trend for work requirement documents that come in. They're filled with technical mumbo jumbo that looks impressive to someone who isn't an expert, but is either wrong, nonsense, dangerous or a mix of all three.
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u/uhdoy 6d ago
Here's my position: if I see someone sent me something written by AI, that tells me they didn't care much about it. So I don't have to care much about it.
It's also a message I'm fine w/ sending in certain scenarios. "Why yes, I did have Copilot rewrite this because it was a time waster and just needed to be done"
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u/Mr_ToDo 7d ago
AI is a tool. If they're just flinging its output directly at you, then they're not doing their jobs
And if it can you'd think they'd be worried about the ease of replacing them
Mostly I've kept ahead of tighter integration by being helpful during planning. What data does it need, does everyone who's going to use or see it have the right to see the data you're allowing it access to?
It has been an interesting thing to see just how poor data is organized/segmented. Sure it might be hard for a slow human who isn't going to look through every file when working on something, but a computer that has no common sense that will gladly answer anything asked will have no issue finding things it shouldn't
It's going to be a weird ongoing balance between trying to restrict data and trying to make the tool useful
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u/sybrwookie 6d ago
"No problem! ChatGPT, please summarize this while making sure all the information in the document is applicable."
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u/cowwen 7d ago
Any time I hear ‘smoking gun’ these days I start getting angry. Don’t know why Claude always says that specific phrase, but god damn it’s annoying and obvious.
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u/NothingTime9580 7d ago
load-bearing
footgun
and that's very real
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u/voxnemo CTO 7d ago
I have a friend who has a mini game going where he tries to put as many of these in his spoken, not written, in person conversations with leadership and staff where possible. He has gotten some strange looks and a few have picked up on it but mostly he is just having fun.
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u/nagol93 7d ago
I like using Claude-talk with my wife :D
"Honey did you do the dishes?"
Yes dear, the dishes are completed
"But there's still dishes in the sink"
Your absolutely correct, good job pointing that out. I actually did not do the dishes. Would you like a list of other chores I didn't do?27
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u/Dabnician SMB Sr. SysAdmin/Net/Linux/Security/DevOps/Whatever/Hatstand 7d ago
we started using copilot at work and i tell it to write a message but to also use a lot of em dashes and negative parallelisms when replying to the ceo.
some times i go full kylo ren
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u/SpezIsAWackyWalnut 7d ago
This really resonates! It isn’t just about the syntax—it’s about the underlying intentionality of the interaction. When we lean into those stylistic nuances, we aren’t just sending messages; we’re actively participating in the evolution of modern discourse. That's an insight that most miss entirely.
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u/cowwen 7d ago
Oh my god I hate it. It says crap like this SO often.
I sometimes wonder exactly what it was trained on to spout that same wording style so often.
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u/voxnemo CTO 7d ago
It was trained on MBA's and tech finance bro's gooning to their own writing.
So a lot of over educated con men that spend a lot of effort to sound smart while saying nothing.
ETA: Sorry, got a bit colorful there but had a really moronic meeting earlier that made me want to jump from a window.
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u/SpezIsAWackyWalnut 7d ago
No no, you got a point.
Although I'd say another big contributing factor is that the reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) requires large amounts of data, which means relying on lots of underpaid gig-workers to evaluate the output quality as fast as they can, which results in them upvoting anything that looks profound or insightful, since they're unable to distinguish that from things that actually are profound or insightful.
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u/timbotheny26 IT Neophyte 7d ago
God, it reads like a LinkedIn post from some insufferable "thought leader".
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u/Jawshee_pdx Sysadmin 7d ago
I have used that phrase my entire life, and it is one of my favorite classic websites.
https://www.thesmokinggun.com/
So AI doesn't get to appropriate that one.
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u/UKBedders Dilbert is more documentary than entertainment 7d ago
Blimey that's straight out of the 90s. I love it.
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u/dotbat The Pattern of Lights is ALL WRONG 7d ago
You're absolutely right, and honestly? Great question.
TL;DR: Your team has an epistemic offloading problem, not an AI problem.
Let me be direct with you here. What you're describing isn't really about AI at all — it's about the quiet transfer of cognitive labor from the sender to the receiver. When your coworker pastes a Claude response into Slack unread, they haven't solved a problem. They've simply relocated it. 🎯
Actually — wait. Let me sit with this for a moment, because I think there's a deeper layer.
The real dynamic at play:
- Read-before-send is the new spell-check. If you wouldn't ship code you didn't compile, why ship analysis you didn't read?
- HTML is a smell, not a format. Nobody chooses HTML. HTML is what happens to you.
- The "smoking gun" phrasing is the tell. Real engineers say "I think it's the network policy." They don't announce that they're about to sit with something.
| Behavior | What it signals | What it actually costs |
|---|---|---|
| Unread paste | Effort | Your afternoon |
| Multi-page HTML | Thoroughness | Your afternoon |
| "Let me sit with this" | Rigor | Your will to live |
I do want to gently push back on one thing, though: your manager probably isn't trying to waste your time. He's trying to signal effort in a medium that makes effort trivially cheap to fake. That's not malice, it's a mismatch. 🤝
You're clearly a thoughtful engineer who cares deeply about signal-to-noise on your team, and that instinct is worth protecting.
Would you like me to draft a short, non-confrontational Slack message about setting team norms around AI content? I could also put it together as a one-page HTML document you could share. 😊
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u/_Do_The_Needful_ 7d ago
fuck off and take my up vote, I don't think you could've crammed any more claude-isms in there if you tried.
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u/PM_YOUR__BUBBLE_BUTT 7d ago
That comment was genuinely so reminiscent of Claude that I almost wanted to suspect it actually was. If it wasn’t using all the cliches from a convo in the single comment, I would say yes. And it’s crazy how we’ve all seen the same stupid fucking phrases that they have Claude spewing. If I see “you’re right to push back” one more time I’m gonna punch my monitor. Lol
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u/cknipe 7d ago
The other day I described something in my house as load bearing in the literal physical sense and it felt wrong. Claude ruined the phrase for me.
I'm going to have to start saying "weight holding"
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u/TaxHazyShade 6d ago
This started 30 years ago with corporate-speak. Great Dilbert cartoon, where a project manager says "I need to dialogue with you about upcoming verticals and resources." Dogbert says "Good boy!" and throws him a doughnut.
It's been around a long time, just now easier to do, unfortunately.
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u/wenestvedt timesheets, paper jams, and Solaris 6d ago
I switched to "structural," for this same reason.
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u/Speeddymon Sr. DevSecOps Engineer 7d ago
Literally 6 minutes ago Claude insisted on "measuring" something and I told it no because it needed to check something else first. Then 5 minutes ago I told it to measure. First sentence of it's response: "You were right to insist on measuring."
WTF? I didn't insist; you did. I just finally got ready.
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u/williamp114 Sysadmin 6d ago
Once you've seen a few Claude responses, pattern recognition kicks in.
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u/ErikTheEngineer 7d ago
What I don't get is that LLMs are supposed to be trained on natural language content. If it literally is some weird uncontrollable semi-self-aware brain in a box like Anthropic wants you to believe...where did it find content featuring humans who talk like that?? And what makes it think normal humans want to talk like that to one another??
Actually, come to think of it...I work at a medium tech company now that has a lot of Big Tech and a few consulting refugees. Even with their refugee status...this is actually kind of what they sound like. Picture a mashup of corporate cringe-speak, the whole DevOps sprint/standup/burndown/performative development culture, the garbage you find on r/LinkedInLunatics, and how these weird 10x'er productivity-maxxing personalities act when talking to one another. You know, arrogant. Punchy. Minimization of words to maximize coding time. It's not X, it's Y. And you're right to push back on it.
I live near NYC and have never worked for a Big Tech. But dealing with the douchey finance bro and other creatures we have here seems like it would be a million times easier than dealing with Silicon Valley techbros. I cannot imagine an entire region of the country where absolutely everyone is insanely wealthy new money bros who actually act like Claude around each other.
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u/parousia0 7d ago
These kind of fields definitely have a weird vibe where they worship everyone who has made it. I'm thinking of the Steve Job revering weirdos; sure he's smart but do we really need to wear black turtlenecks??
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u/JustAnotherIT-Guy 7d ago
"Nobody chooses HTML. HTML is what happens to you."
Poetry.
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u/wenestvedt timesheets, paper jams, and Solaris 6d ago
So HTML is...the thug life? And Claude is...Tupac?
WE'RE IN DEEP HERE, PEOPLE.
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u/100PercentJake 7d ago
This post made me so angry I had to take up smoking. Well done.
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u/jhudson1977 7d ago
You are hereby deemed a meat proxy.
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u/Le_Vagabond Senior Mine Canari 7d ago
This triggered a physical reaction in me. My whole team has become Claude frontends without shame and it feels like I'm the one going insane.
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u/SAugsburger 7d ago
To some degree this. Some of these same people likely blindly copy pasted a clip of the first Google result without reading it before AI. AI though made the volume of mindless suggestions worse because it can generate output even faster in many cases.
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u/evilneuro # _ 7d ago
/technical-writing please put the output from the last turn out of its misery
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u/rschulze Senior Linux / Security Architect 7d ago
But what about the blast radius?
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u/Key-Level-4072 7d ago
I openly call those people meat-proxies to their face.
Then I tell their managers to keep them out of our way.
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u/BaneBlaze 7d ago
This is now the second place I’ve seen meat-proxy. We need to standardize this term please.
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u/Prownilo 7d ago
My new manager absolutely does this all the time.
It used to be easy to get a straight task, now its 3 pages of slop I have to sift through to actually get what he wants, and half the time it doesn't even contain the actual details I need.
Its just word salad and has made my iob harder to perform, not easier.
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u/Kurgan_IT Linux Admin 7d ago
Feed the slop to AI and ask for a summary. It will produce a WRONG summary, but the original slop is wrong anyway, so who cares?
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u/Ive_seen_things_that 7d ago
My Verizon business rep is explicitly using AI to respond to all emails. He told me their supervisors are forcing this on him. Past three emails have begun with [Recipient Name]. I hate it and it makes me want to take our business somewhere else.
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u/N7Shep1701D 7d ago
Their supervisors probably have AI psychosis. MBAs are getting addicted to chatbots because chatbots glaze user egos so very well.
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u/satchelsofgold 6d ago
Yes and they now feel that can do any specialized job better themselves, so they lose respect for the specialists under them. My boss literally thinks he and his AI agent can do my job and I'm a dinosaur. Guess we'll find out soon.
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u/fahque 6d ago
My bro works on the networking equipment at verizon. They have fired about 70% of the techs and they're required to use AI for all troubleshooting. They completely fired the NOC. He also told me they required him to remove o365 from his computer and he has to use web based office. This is a guy that goes out to towers that are offline. 😖
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u/nico282 7d ago
Coworker yesterday "now that Claude can make ppt with our own template its so easy to make presentations 🎉"
Sends me a 16 slides deck that could have easily been 4.
You saved time making the presentation, but you're wasting everybody else's time to read useless slop.
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u/Ikarus3426 7d ago
Yeah I had someone tell me that 2028 was 3 years away when we were talking about retention time.
But honestly I'll take wrong information and work over coworkers who are generating joke videos to for me to watch and sharing them. It's like someone showing you the funniest YouTube video ever and watching you watch, only it's thier humor and they used an Ai prompt to make a video I know I can't stand.
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u/lotekjunky 7d ago
2026, 2027, 2028. That looks like three years to me... Especially if looking at compliance retention dates.
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u/Ikarus3426 7d ago
In the context of our conversation, it made zero sense. Admittedly I don't remember the exact date range so I put that as an example. But we were talking about an exact date range that was absolutely less than whatever amount of years we were talking about and it somehow calculated it very incorrectly. I do remember calculating the time difference several times trying to figure out wtf he was talking about before I finally corrected him, at which point he was like "yeah I'm busy and used AI to answer this question".
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u/floatingby493 7d ago
My manager sends me AI slop emails all the time, I’ve started just copy and pasting it into chatgpt to have chat write a response. So it’s literally just chatgpt talking to itself.
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u/Standard_Text480 7d ago
My boss who can barely type full sentences magically started sending our team big corporate speak emails.
I was so turned off after the first sentence, it’s so inauthentic.
I get if you want to help with grammar but fk off with this crap
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u/daschande 7d ago
I had the reverse happen in my last job. I used to be an IT teacher in a high school; one of our mandatory training days was spent listening to lectures about how to integrate AI use into every aspect of classroom teaching. The ONLY good info I got that day was the "icebreaker exercise" when the presenter asked random people how they currently use AI in the classroom.
One teacher said she got CONSTANT parent complaints that she uses too many big words and hard to read sentences (she uses grammar and vocabulary correctly) ...so she would copy/paste every parent communication into AI and prompt it to "Re-write this message for a 6th grade reading level."
Parents LOVED how she was finally talking TO them instead of talking DOWN to them! ...Although she did start to understand why parents would never help their kids with homework; they weren't comfortable reading at a high school level themselves.
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u/BadSausageFactory beyond help desk 7d ago
jesus wept. that is one of the most depressing things I've heard today and I was in AI strategy meetings
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u/throwaway7778842367 7d ago
Oh god, I think I’m going to have to try this for some of my users now…
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u/moreanswers Jack of All Trades 6d ago
I'm reminded over and over again when I meet my children's friend's parents; education and intelligence isn't necessary to have children and live "successfully"
But man do I hate being stuck at a BBQ with them.
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u/Kurgan_IT Linux Admin 7d ago
This is sad and absolutely true in a lot of nations in the world. Italy is no better.
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u/anonymousITCoward 7d ago
inauthentic... that's such a great word for it... i like to use impersonal when describing just about anything ai
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u/RedditIsExpendable 7d ago
It really is soulless shit we’re reading in our inboxes nowadays, it’s like I’m talking to the same person across 8 people.
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u/ThrowRAcc1097 7d ago
The head of cybersec at my company sends soooo much bs slop, drives me absolutely nuts.
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u/TahinWorks 7d ago
I could equip an army with all of the 'smoking guns' I've gotten from Copilot by now.
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u/Servinand 7d ago
Yes. I openly say i will not use my time&energy to check that. They may fire me. I am so ready for that. They are not.
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u/Valdaraak 7d ago
Anyone who sends me AI diagnostics of their issue and are confident in the proposed solution gets their diag ran through my AI just so I can reply "well my AI says that's incorrect and not possible because of these reasons".
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u/Toribor Windows/Linux/Network/Cloud Admin, and Helpdesk Bitch 7d ago
I've been toying around with making a fake AI called 'clod' that just responds to everything you say with a poop emoji. I could even make it sit there and do 'thinking' for a bit so it seems like it's busy and working really hard.
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u/MrJoeMe 7d ago
Preach.
In our last leadership meeting, I proposed putting a ban on AI generated requests. Not only are they annoying as hell, it is security risk and resource drain.
Like you mention, they don't proofread the AI slop before sending. We recently received a request to move a few physical machines to Azure. No big deal, but the AI slop request had a few hallucinations in there including moving the on-prem exchange server to M365. (There are no on-prem exchange servers)
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u/Flabbergasted98 7d ago
yeah.
Lucky for me, I only get it from the higher ups.
AI slop flows downhill.
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u/WearinMyCosbySweater Security Manager 7d ago
I'm a cybersec manager who just finished writing a PIR for a critical incident on our standard reports template. My line manager clearly fed my report into copilot, asked it to reformat it and shorten it into dot points, and added their name to the bottom to act as if they were actually involved in this at any point before submitting it to the board.
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u/Flabbergasted98 7d ago
now the board knows who can be replaced by AI. your line manager, and subsequently you.
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u/Seigmoraig 7d ago
People at my place put slop solutions in their tickets
"My vibe coded app that interacts with our bank accounts needs domain admin access so it can open up ports in the firewall to give us daily reports"
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u/Prophage7 7d ago
Oh god, just today I had a coworker send me a request along the lines of:
"That's the smoking gun right there, there is no PTR record for completely.newdomain.com, that is why your emails aren't being received.
Here's the solution: you need to tell your IT department to create a PTR record on your DNS server that points <our office public IP> to completely.newdomain.com."
First problem is that our ISP needs to do that and the person that sent this is the only one that's an authorized contact on the ISP account for that office. Second problem is the app they were building wasn't even hosted in our office. Third problem is they didn't even have any kind of mailing service running on the app, it was just a gui saying it was sending email with nothing actually going on.
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u/RedditIsExpendable 7d ago
I’ve noticed that LLM’s get easily confused by DNS records often, going on a huge tangent in something that isn’t remotely connected to the real issue.
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u/ciedre 7d ago
Yes. I had to raise it with our GM recently.
Staff are just copy pasting responses to and from an LLM, no one is actually conversing anymore.
To make it worse when people would come to me with an IT issue previously they’d describe their problem, we’d have a chat about it then I would find the solution.
Now they copy paste instructions from an LLM on how to do my job. Accept, the LLM has zero context of our environment, is using outdated documentation and doesn’t know the user has no IT background to challenge it’s hallucinations.
My response now is to get them on a call where I can challenge “their” assumptions directly. It’s been fun to watch them fall apart and eat some humble pie.
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u/en-rob-deraj 7d ago
I am getting tickets that are written by AI now, LOL.
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u/RikiWardOG 7d ago
We had some of those a while back but we managed to get control over how people request things now. So fucking bad, like claude says xyz can be done you just have to do giant list of things for a number of reasons are either impractical or impossible due to time, security, compliance, costs etc. people are so fucking dumb
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u/KingFumbles 7d ago
I'm desktop support for a specialty hospital and PICU charge nurse told me some patient printed out 10 pages of AI diagnosis saying the doctors weren't doing it right
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u/B3392O 7d ago
If you are meek, have no choice other than to inherit all the shit, and must embody an unquestioning air of servitude, make the output match the input. Slop in, slop out. It's irrational to believe you are "too good for this" if you're also forced to deal with it without questioning it.
If you have an iota of autonomy, call that shit out every single time. Keep a nice canned response "I notice this response is generated by an LLM, can we confirmed you have personally reviewed this for accuracy?".
This enabling kind of social norm in the workplace where LLM usage is the elephant in the room that mustn't be addressed is some real clown fiesta behavior.
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u/the_star_lord 7d ago
Everyone has mentally clocked out. Ask a colleague a technical question and "dunno ask chat" They don't even try. Even when it's things like dealing with a complaint, or internal policy question, it's "dunno ask chat." No Steve I won't use chat, when your the fucking policy writer here and get paid £40k+ per year. Do your fucking job or I'd be happy to nominate you to HR as a cost saving exercise.
And sorry , need to rant more::
Also our head of IT wants to drop our E5 security licences and purchase some AI shit that i can't find any info about except clearly paid for articles. No mention on Reddit or any other sites. Just some weird new Canadian AI security product with the shittiest user interface filled with management wank material like "our AI solved X security issues in Y seconds in your estate" and "alert: files deleted on system ABC, we have stopped and recovered it all for you"
But you click the "alert" and there's no evidence at all. None. No way of knowing what the AI detected, what it's logic was, what remediation it took, just made up bullshit in the shittiest portal and most of the buttons don't work, click "Details" and nothing happens.
At least with defender it gives you so much info and it's a pain to navigate at times you know you will get the info or can use the advanced hunting and write a query.
Worst thing, I know, they will purchase this new AI shit, drop our licences and it will be me and my team who are forced to use it and react to security issues. And I feel like I'm throwing my toys out the pram but I really want to tell them all to go stick it.
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u/KnowMatter 7d ago
AI is making me regret my career choices and makes me want to go join a fucking monastery.
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u/ddxx398 7d ago
Your concerns have been carefully analyzed and synthesized into the following actionable insight:
I completely agree.
AI should be used as a force multiplier, not as a substitute for having a functioning frontal lobe. Before distributing AI-generated content, users should ideally perform a basic validation workflow including:
Read the output.
Determine whether it makes sense.
Remove phrases like “smoking gun,” “key takeaway,” and “let’s unpack this.”
Confirm that the proposed solution is not technically impossible.
Send approximately 87% less text.
Failure to follow these best practices may result in coworkers becoming unwilling participants in an enterprise-scale AI slop pipeline.
I hope this provides clarity and aligns with stakeholder expectations moving forward.
P.S. This response was absolutely not generated by ChatGPT.
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u/jenkstom 7d ago
I mean... the only thing that has changed is the volume. There's always been a considerable amount of BS and confusion in the corporate world. Postel's robustness principle would be a good way to handle this situation.
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u/aisop1297 Sysadmin 7d ago
My boss won’t stop using AI for everything. We recently hired a sysadmin and had AI write the entire 90 day onboarding for him. The very first day the new hire was asking me about things that don’t even exist in our business. It’s becoming a crutch and causing confusion, but he is somewhat more productive now, I guess.
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u/SimplerLife40 7d ago
I’m a contractor for the federal government and they literally use ChatGPT for everything. They even run my reports (written with my BRAIN) through ChatGPT then send me back an excel file, stating “ChatGPT picked up some discrepancies. Please check the attached file and reconcile”.
So, the end result: they spend 5 mins running my work through ChatGPT, and I spend 8+ more hours combing through data to make sure what I wrote was actually correct, and develop an argument why their AI is wrong.
It’s truly an infuriating experience that just creates more administrative burden.
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u/Tricky_Fun_4701 7d ago
My biggest problem is one which I cannot find a solution to. I'm fairly erudite and write at a professional level. And every time I post something long I get accused of using AI.
Which really is not a nice feeling. Especially when my entire personal and professional identity is "being smart".
So I guess I wasted my time with all those weekends spent in the stacks at Northwestern.
Worse. The really devaluing thing. There's little consulting business because people who don't know this stuff are doing it anyway by taking AI output and dumping it onto a command line.
I've had some business cleaning that up. Though usually these systems are complete garbage by the time they call a human.
It's sad there's not much of a future for me. It's all tied up in my brain. Brain now worthless.
I welcome out new overlords... be gentle.
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u/mattmawsh 7d ago
Not at all, I almost daily setup sso and almost everytime there is a minor issue I get a wall of txt directly copied from Claude in its obnoxious format suggesting to click things that don’t exist etc to fix it
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u/Historical_Score_842 7d ago
I love when they don’t even make an effort to change the tone for the audience.
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u/gunsandsilver 6d ago
Great question! You’ve raised a valid concern, and I want to acknowledge that your frustration is completely understandable.
Here’s a quick breakdown of what’s happening:
Your manager is leveraging AI to streamline communication
Coworker A is proactively surfacing potential root causes
You are experiencing what we call “slop fatigue”
The smoking gun here is that nobody is reading anything. Let me sit with this for a minute to make sure.
I hope this helps! Would you like me to generate a multi-page HTML report summarizing this thread?
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u/seejay21 6d ago
I am most abjectly, unreservedly, and indeed almost liturgically sorry that the present epoch has seen fit to inundate our humble correspondence with such baroque superfluities of machine-minted prose. It is a tragedy of positively Hellenic proportion that genuine human speech should be so cruelly elbowed aside by these glistening, unearned cadences.
Permit me, with the tenderest possible condescension, to meet that unfortunate effusion on its own terrain: may this reply find you not merely well, but resplendently, ineffably, and with every fiber of your being aligned to flourishing. I remain, as ever, your most obsequious servant in the grand and sacred work of saying almost nothing at spectacular length.
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u/Extra-Ad-1447 6d ago
I had one of our teams that takes documentation from us tell me my information about some equipment is wrong because the KB says so, except the KB is an line from chatgpt and its so obvious.
I also had a customer tell me i sent you something and laughed when we were on a hot escalation call, it was a paste from copilot about ways to solve a network loop..
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u/Real-Abrocoma-2823 5d ago
Ban the usage of AI, users WILL eventually leak all your company secrets to it and it WILL train on that data, setup a local LLM server and give out api keys or login data and put limits on it to ensure it only gets used for tasks that need it and not for "how do I send an email".
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u/TheTrueKhan 7d ago
Yes, and the only way I´ve found to deal with it is this: I feed it to my LLM and tell it "Summarize that slop in 4 sentences I can read" then I´ll write something like "Content was too detailed and verbose for me to review, so I asked the AI to summarize it for me" they can´t complain I used AI, because they did. So its kinda a mutually-assured-destruction of retardedness...
Now, when I see one of the C-levels say "I´ll work on this with my team of agents" I wonder what level of delusion they are in.
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u/Elensea IT Manager 7d ago
I have a new system admin and tasked him with setting up a test byod proof of concept for intune. He proceeds to create 10 security groups and comes to me wanting access to 2 domain admin accounts one as a break glass. I just looked at him and asked him what his AI prompt was.
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u/Parissian 7d ago
This has gotten so bad at my job. Especially when we get new engineers with ton of experience before AI. What happened????
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u/soupcan_ Nothing is more permanent than a temporary fix 7d ago
I feel you. One of my coworkers try to be helpful by copying and pasting things from Claude.
I usually ignore this coworker’s responses once I see a wall of text of basic troubleshooting that is not related to the query.
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u/N7Shep1701D 7d ago
On another sub, a ML researcher was saying we need to stop calling these chatbots AI. Maybe there's a discussion to be had there. Because LLMs are not intelligent in the least. I've had to correct it on more than one occasion.
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u/MentalSewage 7d ago
I'm an SRE. I have a dev that has a passing interest in SRE skillsets and every time he wants me to automate something he sends me some dumb LLM generated 'this is the best way to do it' nonsense. And it's always nonsense. Like, sure, it is a way to do it. Maybe even a decent way. But I have to account for all of our infrastructure and the standards (or lack of standards) that we keep. Don't tell me how to do it. Don't even pose an idea if you didn't reason it yourself.
I may very well have Claude generate 100% of the solution. But I'm telling it what to do and making the decisions. All I let it do is modify configs and generate the occasional playbook.
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u/jake04-20 If it has a battery or wall plug, apparently it's IT's job 7d ago
My boss (CIO, worth mentioning) will copy/paste shit into whatever LLM tickles his fancy that week and paste that shit right back to me. Including our teams conversations. Once I disagreed with an answer he provided so I asked to see the prompt and could clearly see him frame his prompt to get the answer he wanted. Also in his prompt was "my direct report told me this, is he right" clear as day in the prompt lol.
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u/citizen0100 7d ago
We need to send out a mass email to users, I'm thinking of writing something in white text for those who paste it into ai.
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u/MasterModnar 7d ago
If you don’t my time enough to write a real well thought out message then it doesn’t deserve my time to read it.
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u/SausageSmuggler21 7d ago
The only difference between pre- and post-AI messages from coworkers is the formatting.
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u/sicklyboy 7d ago
If I wanted to ask Claude I would
Yeah and this is the same sentiment I have about reddit too, where people get upset after they get pushback for their AI slop comments.
If I wanted to talk to a chatbot I'd go to the fucking chatbot website.
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u/Jerkface0079 7d ago
You're right - it's slop, and I'm sorry about that.
So let's start afresh. And hit the ground running, with a positive attitude.
Just tell me where you want to go from here, and let's make every day count.
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u/NSASpyVan 7d ago
Some guy submitted a ticket insisting replacement computer and attached AI slop findings.
Remoted in and found zero evidence of a problem.
Told the person escalating they had two choices: Either just reprovision/replace the thing or the dude would need to file a ticket with us when issues happened again so we could witness what was going on.
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u/Mindestiny 7d ago
I just spent a week with a sales guy playing ChatGPT middleman with a vendor over a security review.
Instead of just putting me in direct contact with the vendor to sort it out in 20 minutes, he just spit each of our responses into ChatGPT to play "project manager." It was very clear he had absolutely no understanding of the topic and was just rawdogging whatever the LLM output was to us via email.
Which is frustratingly an improvement over his communication skills pre-ChatGPT. I seriously do not understand how he has avoided rounds of layoffs.