AI presentations

In yet another training provided by my employer, I learned about several AI tools specifically intended for creating presentation slide decks, as well as Microsoft Copilot, which can also be used in that capacity. Although I wouldn’t say I have to create these regularly, I probably put together three or four of them a year and my students create them for every project they complete in my classes. So I decided to experiment with this capability.

I used this blog post as a topic for a presentation slide deck. When a theater artist comes up with some unexpected way to address a stage conundrum, sometimes it’s presented at a conference using just this kind of slide deck. Because I often write these things up and post to my blog, I thought that would be a good test case to run. 

I created one slide deck with Microsoft Copilot and a second with a tool specifically aimed at this purpose, Slidesgo. I tried the third one, PresentationsAI, but it quickly became obvious it was going to be more work trying to get my presentation to fit into its template then I was willing to invest, so I bailed before I even got it to generate a draft.

Here are a couple of slides from the presentation Copilot generated:

(A few more slides here)

It’s not horrible, but it’s basically a first draft and I’m not sure why I would create a slide deck this way instead of just doing it myself with PowerPoint or Google Slides. The one created with Slidesgo was less acceptable and would have required more tweaking to even make it something I wanted to screenshot and share here.

This feels like another “application” for this technology which doesn’t improve upon the existing way to do it & which in fact might make it even more of a pain in the butt than just starting from scratch yourself.