Comment by QuantumNomad_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by QuantumNomad_ | Hacker News Reader

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> The purpose of making a powerpoint deck before a meeting is rarely the value of a deck. Rather it is signaling that someone spent some time actually organizing their thoughts instead of bloviating spontaneously.

> All of this is lost with AI led design. Producing designed artifacts are free and instant. Yeah you will impress the old folks for a year or so who haven't caught onto the joke.

I was at an AI/LLM themed hackathon recently. At the end the winning teams presented what they’d done.

The slides were all AI generated, which was fair given the theme and the short time they had at the end to prepare to say something (~10 minutes given to prepare after winners were announced, and before that all teams were spending all the three or so hours we had fully focused on the tasks rather than wasting time making presentations about what had been done).

Still felt a bit weird to see someone speak with slides that were as surprising to themselves as it was to the audience. Like I said, no shade on them in this case given the theme of the hackathon. But it does make me wonder how the future will be at many jobs where “velocity”/“productivity” is so much in the focus that unreviewed LLM generated slides becomes the norm. Hopefully not.

Obviously if you make the slides yourself then you'd know the content well.

The way of using these tools is not to one-shot your slide deck (unless you have plenty time to learn the content) but give it a base product you've already worked on and ask it to make it pretty, interesting, etc. and perhaps make small changes to the content which you'd review and learn.

You can probably use a knife as a fork but it wouldn't be the best way of using the knife.

> The way of using these tools is not to one-shot your slide deck

This line of thinking IMO is hopelessly naive. Yes, the responsible way to use AI and perhaps the way _you_ use it is to do some formatting/cleaning up/enhancement of slides that you primarily authored yourself. The reality is that _most_ people are using and will use AI as a way to breeze through as much work as possible either out of laziness or pressure and their "reviews" will primarily consist of "LGTM." Which is going to lead to an explosion of "did you even read this?" or "did you even test this?"-style disasters.

It’s even worse when you cant push back with “did you even read this”, because the politics haven’t evolved to constrain the slop.

We are getting pre-solutioned massive epics, dozens of files, from senior leaders (non-ICs); when shit goes sideways, what do you do? Our jobs are already at risk just in general, and we have new KPIs around generative AI (as do those senior leaders). I’m not sticking my neck out get chopped off.

Just last week I had to make some shit up in my uplevel status report to shift blame away from an AVP. Technically it’s my fault, for not digging into the 30 files (and tanking my own metrics,m); I don’t even feel like it matters - the devs just hand that off to an LLM anyway to meet their KPIs. I’m just thankful it didn’t go to prod.

For some reason, I read "LGTM" as "Let's Go to Market," and spooked myself with the realization that that's absolutely the way this is all headed.

I beg people to send me their prompts rather than the stochastic text expanded drivel they send me as memos/plans/etc... Massive waste of my time responding to ghosts - actually taking 10 pages seriously that often the "author" has barely read. I'd much rather get some unstructured bullet points if those are actually a person's ideas.

I love AI. Used well it's a massive enhancer to make things. But yeah whats the value of a presentation that the presenter is also seeing for the first time. Not just zero. Since it wasted everyone's time and bandwidth the value is negative.

Almost 20 years ago, a professor I had in grad school agreed to let me submit my very detailed outline rather than filling in all the text to turn it into paragraphs. It's still the way I write presentations where I'll be speaking.

Maybe the "fill in the paragraphs" step was always unnecessary and we've finally stopped making people do it.

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