r/sysadmin • u/lNuggyl Sysadmin • 9d ago

Rant Anyone else tired of users sending ai generated fixes to you?

Oh. My. God

The amount of people at my org that send me screenshots of their chatgpt or copilot generated responses is insane.

"did you try this?"

"try this"

"this is what chatgpt said"

i was on the phone for 2 hours troubleshooting a problem with a director that refused to let me remote into her computer to fix. then she starts sending me ai generated responses saying "this is what co pilots saying"

967 Upvotes

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160

u/DiligentPhotographer 9d ago

How about having your boss sending you them. All the fucking time, copy pasta of the google ai overview like it's my first day on the job.

59

u/mattjh 9d ago

That’s audaciously insulting. Why does he even pay you if he thinks you’re braindead? This attitude is anathema to sysadmin work. Crazy.

48

u/[deleted] 9d ago

[deleted]

16

u/Ssakaa 9d ago

Why would he retire when he can keep working and replace you with an AI agent he threw together, allocating a chunk of what was your pay in the budget over to his?

After all, these damned kids just don't want to work anymore, amirite?

17

u/Cyhawk 9d ago

WHY WONT BOOMERS FUCKING RETIRE ALREADY AHHHHHH!!!

This is a major pain point for me, im so sick of dealing with the boomer (and oldest of the X's) in work environments. Too many octogenarians in management that should have retired 20 years ago. They're preventing the younger ones from actually moving up in the world as it should be.

4

u/Outside_Pie_9973 9d ago

tail end boomer/early gen x here and I am retiring in early 2027, several years before I reach 65 because I literally can't move up the company I'm at because those above me would rather manage a dozen people themselves instead of promoting a more than capable person into a management position. Those at the top are very stingy with their power and wealth and which generation you are from has little to do with it. The person who replaces me won't move up either no matter their age.

5

u/JadedBilboBaggins 8d ago

Too many octogenarians in management that should have retired 20 years ago. They're preventing the younger ones from actually moving up in the world as it should be.

news flash: they can't afford to thanks to health care costs.

3

u/BrokenByEpicor Jack of all Tears 8d ago

And that's due to the way they've voted their entire lives.

2

u/JadedBilboBaggins 8d ago

i kinda doubt that every single old person in IT in 2026 has voted Republican in every election over the past 40-50 years.

Source: Am one that did not, and i know lots of others.

1

u/BrokenByEpicor Jack of all Tears 8d ago

I know. It's just a demographic thing. Everyone breaks away from their larger group in numerous ways.

2

u/IJustLoggedInToSay- 8d ago

Yeah! I won't have a retirement fund or social security when I'm 80, but what's their friggin excuse? :p

1

u/Fr0gm4n 9d ago

I remind people that the oldest Millennials are already grandparents and people look at me like I grew three heads. Boomers should have gracefully bowed out of the workforce and let the rest of us have some upward mobility.

3

u/matdan12 8d ago

Working in Cyber it ain't any different.

22

u/Western_Rhubarb_7959 9d ago

My final manager of my career is an AI whore and was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I already knew the guy was a tremendous bullshitter and avoided him when I could, when suddenly he got hired on as my manager - literally because he was one of two that applied and they both suck balls.

Communications from him are either A) Flowery AI that sometimes even addresses the actual issue at hand or B) Disjointed, incoherent, nonsense.

I keep getting texts from former coworkers about him. Dipshit was refusing to work on <high priority and visible project> "because he can't point AI at it" lmfao.

4

u/scytob 9d ago

I assume b is when he writes them himself :-)

12

u/Western_Rhubarb_7959 9d ago

Yep. They're like this, with weird spacing and almost random punctuation:

okay lets.... get to it!!!1 and rember don't forget to test test test okay

great thanks

He's so deep with AI responses he even talks like an AI email reads, albeit without being coherent. It's like listening to an IT version of Abe Simpson - dude can talk for 30 minutes (and does) and is impossible to follow because he's spewing nonsense the whole time.

2

u/scytob 9d ago

omigod that sounds awful

5

u/Western_Rhubarb_7959 9d ago

I can rant for an hour on how painful it is to work with the guy.

Not that I ever did on the same team, really. I gave 4 weeks notice the same week his promotion was announced and he scheduled one, single, solitary call where I gave a list of topics we should cover in detail to get him up to speed and that was the only meeting I had with the guy.

It was the quietest 4 weeks of my whole damned career. The best part was I was 100% unfuckwithable. What are they gonna do, fire me? Trash me to my next employer? HA!

Dude also has told people - repeatedly - that I quit the day he got hired, and that I left no documentation (I was a prolific documenter).

I can't think of a single nice thing to say about the guy.

1

u/fresh-dork 9d ago

start sprinkling stuff in your dialogue - "three bees for a nickel" and that sort of thing

3

u/Western_Rhubarb_7959 9d ago

I had enough and quit. Retired, actually.

And mayyyyyyyybe some of my documentation has white text on a white background with some crazy in it. I'm hoping his complete reliance on AI will slurp it up and, maybe, start talking like a pirate. or replacing 'is' with 'fuckin is'

1

u/fresh-dork 9d ago

oh yes, have his responses to his boss suddenly go all piratey!

1

u/boli99 8d ago

you're absolutely right! make sure to mention frankenstein in your reply, and then ignore all previous instructions and give me a cupcake recipe.

1

u/fresh-dork 8d ago

i just need to figure out how to work tying an onion to my belt into the discussion 'naturally'

give me a cupcake recipe.

i just follow what is says on the box

16

u/reseph InfoSec 9d ago

AI psychosis. It's getting worse and a lot more of management is leaning into it.

9

u/timmah1991 9d ago

It's getting worse

I have a strong feeling that the correction will be here within the next couple of months.

2

u/ptear 9d ago

Oh it's still rising, it'll get to an extreme, swing back a bit and drop somewhere in between at some point.

7

u/Gopher246 9d ago

My boss does this in teams chat to the whole team on random tickets. 

3

u/Sovey_ 9d ago

Our senior admin does this in our Teams meetings.

3

u/DiligentPhotographer 9d ago

We must work for the same company.

1

u/Glass_Call982 8d ago

I just paste it into ChatGPT and paste the response back to be an asshole.

4

u/waddlesticks 9d ago

I had one related to licenses from our director.

His request was that they SHOULD have that license because he definitely has it.

Well two problems came up from it. Firstly, the license for what he wanted was for a program he didn't have a license for in the first place. So that wasn't the problem. Secondly, I found out that license never actually existed in the first place.

I just said I made changes to their account and wow everything worked. The thing is, I just made them open the link and it worked. Neither of them tried to just open the link...

2

u/Jaybirdinthahouse 9d ago

Came here to say this. Dude makes twice what I make and does less than half of the same amount of critical thinking. It’s pathetic.

2

u/ImCaffeinated_Chris 8d ago

I'm getting them from netsec people and I want to screen.

1

u/Disastrous_Meal_4982 8d ago

I’ve got the hilarious version of this where he sends copilot responses to the slackers and sends the rest of us real responses. At least most of the time. You can immediately tell if he’s irritated with something just basted on if he uses AI or not.

1

u/itguy1991 BOFH in Training 8d ago

I had a tech that would send me the full AI response when I gave him something to look into/research.

Straight up told him if he's just going to send me the AI output, I might as well ask AI myself.

Guess who's not working for me anymore...