Mastodawn

Thomas Cannon May 2

spicy opinion:

one of the most disrspectful things you can do as a presenter, to your audience, is stand up in front of them and do a talk with a 100% ai generated slide deck.

you couldnt even take the time to build your own deck out, and we're supposed to take you seriously? you didnt care enough to build your own deck, so why should the audience give a shit about it?

its just a sociopathic/narcisistic play to get on stage and be in the spotlight for a moment. and its super obvious.

boo.

@Viss
Walk out loudly

It’s the future.

The future is stupid.

@andreasofthings the future is in fact quite stupid

Nine Stones Close Apr 30

@andreasofthings @Viss now is already stupid

a high doom Apr 30

Early in the flood, i was asked to give a presentation on AI at an all-hands. So i put 9 or 10 slides together, all AI generated, chosen to demonstrate the nightmare of this unfolding timeline. I presented it straight, addressing each horror with corporate flavored enthusiasm for the brave new world.

I never had an audience so engaged. Rapturous looks on faces. Several came up after to say it was the best presentation they had seen. I wanted to cry. Complete miss.

James Tinmouth Apr 30

@Viss don't think that view is spicy at all.

@Viss THANK YOU. "Someone" at my org does this and as soon as I see his slides for the company all-hands, I check out.

Nine Stones Close Apr 30

@Viss I’ve had this at work. . . Just ask a question about the content and you get nothing back other than a panicked look followed by a totally bollocks response, because they have no idea what is behind the slideware bullshit they generated. It’s a form of modern entertainment for those of us that still have a brain and some professional integrity.

deftpunk: your worst daydream.Apr 30

@Viss This is true for *any* communication. Why should anyone expend effort reading something someone else can't be bothered to write?

@deftpunk so many places are using llms for support now. its gross

Paco Hope Apr 30

@deftpunk I get slop at work sometimes where the slopper hasn’t even read their own slop. If they cant be arsed to read it, I sure as fuck can’t.
@Viss

Och Menno Apr 30

@Viss Well i do that a Lot for my Podcast Talks. But i have a tech faul Podcast, so my process ist doing my slides and then let Powerpoint decide how tge Design should be, as a additional fail. But yeah for serious Talks that is a No Go.

@OchmennoPodcast the argument quickly becomes:

if you didnt care to make your own slides, why should the audience care to look at them?

Och Menno May 1

@Viss Well i do a Audio only Podcast normaly but cons want slides so that became a running Gag

Och Menno May 1

@Viss First it was the worst Powerpoint Default Design then the "Design ideas" now whatever Powerpoint builds in to Help to make slides "pritty". I always strive to have the ugliest slides of a con. That is for a Joke. But yeah in a Professional setting build your own slides. Always.

Adrian Sanabria Apr 30

@Viss not even as spicy as your least spicy Etsy offering

Just common sense

Jonathan Yu Apr 30

@Viss it could be a fun party game to make people present slop generated presentations that someone else created, though

doctorlaura Apr 30

@Viss On the other hand, one of my team members is a big Nano Banana user. We both spent about an hour trying to get it to fix an image for a presentation we were making.
We got the image from a partner and it was the wrong style. An hour for one image! We lost count of the prompts. Couldn’t make it work, so I just used some basic Powerpoint art to fix it. Took less than 5 min.

@doctorlaura this is exactly what i mean. if anything, these llms are just a really really expensive way to talk out a thing youre working through and you end up solving the problem yourself. i've done similar with networking configs and some code stuff. little to none of the image generators output is "good". its only 'good' if youre actually looking for high-confidence word salad

Mark Wollschlager Apr 30

@Viss In that case at least have the common decency to have an "AI" generated voice deliver the "presentation"

@Viss I recently attended a talk given by a person whose slides were chalk-a-block with abstract Midjounrney slop images and not one but two different "Who I Am Not" slides at the front.

I thought "No, that's too broad. Maybe just tell us who you are."

@xenotrope shoulda walked out

@Viss I'm too polite

Jean-Baptiste Fidélia May 1

@Viss I don't think this has anything to do with AI. Nobody really I cares how the presentation was created if the content is good and if the presence of a human presenter actually enhance it. AI is a tool, using it have nothing to do with the respect one may have or not have for his/her audience. AI doesn't make a bad presentation good or a good one bad.
There's more worthy battles to be had regarding AI.

Mastodon Migration May 1

Long ago and far away, a guy named Scott McNealy banned the use of PowerPoint...

(Imagine 12.9 gigabytes!)

@mastodonmigration @Viss I've worked with PMs who use PowerPoint like a canvas and bullshit is their brush. They know obscure and esoteric PowerPoint tricks the way accountants know crazy Excel tricks.

One guy I know has a huge color picker bolted onto the side of every slide deck. He leaves it in because painters don't hide their palettes, now, do they?

Sass, David May 1

@xenotrope @mastodonmigration @Viss I wanted that color thingy for years now YEARS!! But I'm not a PowerPoint artist.

Mike Roach May 1

@mastodonmigration @Viss In an alternate universe this ban didn’t exist and employees made a PowerPoint presentations about how commercialise cloud computing and embrace the Linux and x86 platforms much sooner.
RIP Sun

Jernej Simončič �May 1

@mastodonmigration @Viss

(Imagine 12.9 gigabytes!)

… in January 1997.

Negative12DollarBill May 1

@Viss
I was at one of these where the presenter

a) did not know how many slides there were
b) did not know how long his talk would take
c) frequently spoke about something, then moved to the next slide to find that thing was on the next slide and was surprised

Elena Brescacin May 1

@Viss @mastodonmigration Completely automated no. Not at all. But, well, it can give some help. I am a blind person, and find quite uncomfortable to speak using slides. Sometimes though, they're mandatory. And I haven't always sighted folks helping me organizing the graphics. We humans can't become biased worse than AI!
But anyway, I think its duty is to be an aid, not a replacement for my own work. To have a good speech, you must provide users something making sense. And auto-generated descriptions don't help. In fact I use to have a basic structure generated by the bot, then I refine and adjust it. Even writing from scratch but keeping the bot's suggestion.
Then I'll never use it for grammar corrections. I haven't made enough experiments in English, but (at least in Italian) it sometimes invents verbs! As an example "flatline", when a person's heart stops beating (medical drama context) it has invented "flatline" as an Italian verb. Without translating from English but using the Italian verbs conjugation.
I love writing, I'm rigid in grammar rules when I can, not a nazi -at least not with humans- and imagine how I could react!

Garrett Latimer May 1

@Viss Given the panel titles and abstracts at IEEE PES convention in Chicago next week, I'm wondering how much of a nastygram my survey response is going to turn into. (There are a few things on protective relaying for inverter-based resources, but everything else is tech buzzword bingo slop.)

rat (mibioctet)May 1

@Viss
CEO at my last job AI generated his presentation the night before, didn't sleep, rolled on stage 30 minutes late visibly stinking of weed. One slide was six screenshots from his phone of a ChatGPT conversation which he read to the audience.

The company never made a single sale ever again.

@rolenthedeep holy shit. what line of business was the company in?

rat (mibioctet)May 1

@Viss
B2B VR bullshittery, this was right at the peak of the metaverse nonsense

@rolenthedeep hooboy

Seth of the Fediverse ⁂May 1

@Viss Tell me how you really feel! 🤣🤪