But yeah sometimes when I just need to deliver some asset to a customer I use AI to create it and lightly edit it, the result is ok but it's not great.
I share the disdain for AI built presentations, especially Claude has a signature look that is so tiring. I remember this phase when Office 2016 (?) came out and featured this "smart" diagram editor that let you create these cringe arrows, flowcharts etc. with bullet points, some people really got hooked on that and used it everywhere, the result was as cringeworthy as the AI presentations are. Eventually people lost interest and things got back to normal. AI might be different though.
That said I also generate presentation decks for my products with Claude using an HTML based workflow with proper print CSS using Weasyprint, where I use my own corporate identity and design practices from the web, the result looks really professional and pleasing (to me), customers also like it a lot. It doesn't really look like AI either as it's just good HTML and CSS with a print stylesheet. So there are ways of using it to make things better, but it also brings out the lazy side of people that don't care so much.
[–] CharlieDigital 1 day ago
[–] 10111001 1 day ago
Or few truly have the discipline to do that, but they got a lot of it "for free," because of the effort they had to put into making the slide deck.
I'm more and more of the opinion that friction isn't bad, and mindlessly reducing it has actually been bad for us. What we should have are "friction engineers," that carefully design things we need to do to be difficult in precise ways that force us to do other things we benefit from but don't have the discipline to consistently choose.
[–] steveBK123 1 day ago
That is - you can do more & have faster iteration loops, but you can basically burn all the gains on stupid stuff no one needs.
If your org likes to scramble, and/or your management has ADHD.. then LLM slop cannons pointed at things like dashboards, status reports and decks is extremely exciting. People are throwing together materials about content they don't understand for people who aren't going to read it. But the motion feels incredible.
[–] ryandrake 1 day ago
As someone whose job heavily involves giving presentations and writing documents / spreadsheets, I am under tremendous pressure now to simply "output more stuff." AI has increased the amount of "stuff" co-workers are spewing out, and that's apparently what's being measured. I don't know if any of this "stuff" is being read, but my management seems only interested in volume of bits. So, slop it is.
Occasionally, I'm sure this stuff is getting read by a real human, and I apologize in advance if it's you. But incentives are unfortunately totally aligned towards producing mountains of slop.
[–] CharlieDigital 1 day ago
> ...my management seems only interested in volume of bits
Whenever I hear this come up, my first question is "how are you matching that to revenue?" and you can see gears churning...
But now that one no longer needs to actually perform the mechanical deck building, how about spending that gained efficiency on ensuring quality of the output? Play it back at least once. Use that time savings to prep to deliver a killer talk.