ChatGPT and Why it Matters to IT Professionals

Conversational chatbot ChatGPT has captivated the internet with its ability to respond to nearly any prompt and provide real-time answers on a range of topics, and according to the chatbot’s own website, answer follow-up questions, admit mistakes, challenge incorrect premises and reject inappropriate requests.

It’s been available in a preview since the end of November, so the world has had a few months to test it out and play around with this advanced AI chatbot model. The chatbot’s capabilities are truly immense, ranging from responding to both simple and complex questions with accurate information, generating creative text, summarizing text, translating text and more.

It’s no wonder why Microsoft is investing heavily in OpenAI, the nonprofit AI research group that created ChatGPT, with plans to roll advanced AI models into a broad range of its enterprise and consumer products. The use cases for IT professionals are endless, with many already using ChatGPT in place of a search engine to get timely and accurate information they need with more context.

What is ChatGPT?

According to OpenAI, ChatGPT is a large language model that can generate human-like text based on a given prompt or context. It is trained on a wide variety of text and can understand and generate text in a variety of styles and formats.

How is ChatGPT different from other language models?

ChatGPT is one of the largest language models available, with 175 billion parameters, according to OpenAI. This allows it to generate text that is more coherent, consistent, and human-like than other language models. ChatGPT can also be fine-tuned for specific tasks and domains, which allows it to generate more accurate and relevant text.

What are some ways IT professionals can use ChatGPT?

ChatGPT can be used for a wide variety of tasks, such as document generation, customer service, data analysis and more. It can also be integrated with other tools and systems to provide more efficient and accurate information. Users give ChatGPT a prompt or context and then ask it to generate text based on that information. OpenAI also provides an API organizations can use to access the model and integrate it with your own systems and tools.

According to the chatbot itself, it can:

Respond to both simple and complex questions with accurate and relevant information
Generate creative and engaging text, such as stories, jokes and poetry
Summarize long texts and articles
Translate text from one language to another
Generate text in a specific style or tone
Complete incomplete sentences or paragraphs

How can IT professionals use ChatGPT?

The chatbot is quickly becoming a useful tool among IT professionals. According to Reddit posts, IT professionals in r/sysadmin are already using ChatGPT to help them do their jobs. The chatbot is helping them:

Write code and scripts in PowerShell, Rust and Python
Write Ansible playbooks
Write emails explaining technical information to executives
Create automation scripts
Identify flaws and security vulnerabilities in code

Michael Gibbs, CEO of Go Cloud Careers, a global organization that provides training for cloud computing careers, calls ChatGPT “the ultimate enabler” that “can help a hands-on technology professional do the work on ten people.”

The always-busy system administrator would find ChatGPT useful to write scripts to automate a good chunk of their daily work to help keep systems online and secure without burning out those valuable IT professionals, Gibbs says. Meanwhile, software engineers can use the advanced AI model to write the majority of the code needed for project.

“ChatGPT can even write much of the documentation that technology professionals must write in their daily jobs,” Gibbs says.

With cybersecurity professionals reporting higher levels of burnout than others in IT, this field could stand to benefit the most from an AI companion.

According to Steve Povolny, principal engineer and director of the Trellix Advanced Research Center, cybersecurity professionals have been using ChatGPT to help them check for vulnerabilities in code and as a quality control tool in the software development process.

“It’s used very, very widely already to just kind of fact check, and its very accurate in terms of just learning about techniques related to infosec,” Povolny says. “The level of quality and depth and accuracy ChatGPT has is really what makes it stand out.”

Povolny has used it to help write his LinkedIn biography, check code, develop code, develop scripts and run vulnerability assessments. However, it could also be used to spot phishing emails and check text for common themes and spelling errors that are typically made in phishing campaigns.

“I’ve used it to do spot checking for some vulnerabilities, SQL injection kind of thing, looking at simple buffer overflows, and seeing how well it identifies and describes them,” Povolny says. “it’s been very accurate at that.”

What ChatGPT says about uses cases for IT professionals

With an advanced conversational AI model at my fingertips, I thought it prudent to ask the chatbot itself about the use cases for IT professionals, and this is the response I got to the prompt, “How can IT professionals use ChatGPT to help them do their jobs?”:

IT professionals can use ChatGPT to automate repetitive tasks such as document generation, data analysis, and customer service. For example, ChatGPT can be used to generate technical documentation, troubleshoot and diagnose technical issues, or assist with customer inquiries by providing answers to frequently asked questions. Additionally, ChatGPT can be integrated with other tools and systems such as ticketing systems and databases to provide more efficient and accurate information to IT professionals. It can also be used to monitor and analyze log data for security and troubleshooting purposes, generate reports, and even automate incident response workflows.

In another similar prompt, ChatGPT answered this way:

IT professionals can use ChatGPT in a variety of ways, such as:

Automating repetitive tasks: ChatGPT can be used to automate repetitive tasks, such as generating reports or responding to frequently asked questions.

Generating documentation: ChatGPT can be used to generate technical documentation, such as user manuals or troubleshooting guides.

Providing technical support: ChatGPT can be used to provide technical support by answering common questions and providing troubleshooting steps.

Enhancing chatbots and virtual assistants: ChatGPT can be used to enhance the capabilities of chatbots and virtual assistants, such as providing more natural and accurate responses.

Developing new applications: IT professionals can use ChatGPT to develop new applications such as virtual assistants, language translator, and more.

Data Analysis: IT professionals can use ChatGPT to analyze and extract insights from large datasets.

Creating new language models: IT professionals can use ChatGPT to create new language models that are fine-tuned for specific use cases, such as customer service or technical support.

Here’s a more lighthearted query: