alt Hacker News> If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is “Help me visualize.” She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: “Help me edit.” “Beautify this slide.”
To be fair, making slideshows sucks and I've never met anyone that actually enjoys the experience. I'm sure some people out there enjoy it, but anything that gets me out of PowerPoint faster is a win in my book.
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If you care about the information and communication, and you think you can do a good job of the slide deck if you think through it for this venue and audience -- and maybe even have new insights by going through the process -- then it can be enjoyable/rewarding.
But I've also seen situations in which the presenter doesn't care, or the slides are just a backdrop for some better communication/selling/maneuvering they're doing, or they know the information is bogus or the presentation pointless, or they know the audience doesn't care, or for everyone it's just a meeting to be able to say you had a meeting.
I'd guess that at least half the current use of LLMs is for "cheating on your homework" tasks, in which the person prompting it simply doesn't care -- whether it's for schoolwork, professional work, or socializing.
There are two parts of making a slide show: 1. Visualizing what you want to show 2. Finding tools to show it
Developing 1 means you need to start with pen and paper without any pollution from existing tools. You might read and experiment beforehand and use as many tools as possible (including AI) but at least once before you make thr final version you should sit down and just think from scratch what you want to show.
Then you can use AI for 2. Teaching kids 1 is very difficult while simultaneously giving them access to AI since they are too young to develop that self control.
David Byrne seems to like it: https://newsarchive.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/03...
I haven't seen his actual slide deck anywhere online though.
Back when I created them (high school), I enjoyed it, because it was about making an appealing presentation about the data we researched.
There was one I did have fun making:
Back around 2007 it was about AI, and for part of it I'd memorized like 2-3 minutes of what I was going to say, along with careful timing. The plan was that I'd start wandering around, including around the back of my laptop so I wasn't looking at the projector or laptop screen - and during that time, robot characters would wander onto the screen and start running around. The idea was I wouldn't look back until right after they hid themselves. I think I'd even put a spot in the middle where I could glance back while they were hidden, then they'd come back out.
I don't remember why, but I never got to present it.