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Comment by idle_zealot | Hacker News Reader

This is a nightmare scenario to me.

"Claude, prepare me a presentation on XYZ."

I get to work, go straight to the meeting room, and pull up what it made to present.

It's barely coherent nonsense. Lots of irrelevant details, buzz words, wrong charts or confusing phrasing. Obviously LLM output.

I read it out.

When I'm done, I get a question about one of Claude's incorrectly inferred details.

The shame instantly kills me.

This is a scenario I've seen play out with coworkers. Except that last part, instead of dying or owning up to the mistake of trusting LLM output they waffle. Their shame circuit is broken.

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Someone I know does this, and seems to think it's a flex, because he bragged about it being "the first time I've actually seen this presentation" a few times during the presentation.

It was all awful.

I feel like we need to normalize walking out of meetings like that. If you have no idea what you’re presenting why is anyone in the room?

At my previous company, a distinguished engineer did this. Used generated slides he hadn't looked at until presenting to the entire staff+ engineer group. The slides weren't good and he mostly ignored them.

I would immediately stand up and walk out of there. That's my time you're wasting!

It’s not your time anymore. It’s the corporations time ;)

That is incredibly disrespectful of them _unless_ they prepared in other ways or are some expert who doesn't really need slides.

I don't really know what the right response is, though. Walking out would be seen as way too hostile

“I came in unprepared. Please hold your applause.”

A Canadian politician did this during a speech in front of the house/parliament or whatever. In the middle of the speech the LLM wrote "Here's a more natural, flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech" and he read it verbatim and then continued on, not even realizing what he just read.

Previously having a deck was basically a signal that said “I took some time to prepare for this meeting and put together some coherent talking points” even if the deck itself was just a bunch of of text outlining what the speaker was saying.

Now that people are generating decks with AI, they’re basically worthless. I don’t need a bunch of bullet points you didn’t take anytime to think about on the screen while you talk about something you didn’t prepare for.

Why on earth would you present a presentation that you haven't reviewed ahead of time?

I wish I knew, but I've definitely seen it happen.

"What does this bit mean?" "I dunno."

Why even have a meeting? That's just a waste of time when agents are much better at reviewing plans anyway. You don't even need presentations anymore. Executive officers can just create a review agent with a "special sauce" prompt (essential to justify their high salary) and auto sign off on a plan if it passes the crucial test: "is this plan good?" Finally we can have true business automation and people can go back to much more important things, like looking at KPI reports and being impressed or unimpressed.

That sounds incredibly frustrating. It's bad enough in code reviews, but is that approach to work being tolerated in meetings these days?

Because you think ChatGPT will do the job for you, and sadly, the quality drop doesn’t universally hurt people

That is incredibly frustrating for a coworker to do that. Even if you do use an LLM to generate all the slides it is your job as a presenter to go through and make edits and actually practice the presentation.

If you are just presenting it for the first time after seeing it you are going to just be reading off the slides, which is a waste of everyones time.

PowerPoint Karaoke used to be a fun distraction; now it's literally people's job.

This made me laugh out loud.

All the Apple Intelligence commercials were shamelessly this too. Felt like such poor branding for apple

> It's barely coherent nonsense. Lots of irrelevant details, buzz words, wrong charts or confusing phrasing. Obviously LLM output.

Plenty of that even before LLMs too though.

Defaults matter a lot. Before you had to intentionally be lazy to put together garbage and call it a day. Now your boss is telling you to use AI to "speed up." The tool you're pointed to presents like it can make the slide for you and claims to do so. Every signal is screaming that you're supposed to be a lazy fraud, and people will, on average, take the path of least resistance.

I'm attending a conference that I also attended last year, and it's night and day.

This year, a good 40% of workshop slides are fully LLM generated, incomprehensible, and almost not matching what the speaker is talking about at all. Last year, while there were some poor presentations, standards were much higher.

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