Presentation software has been getting worse for years. PowerPoint ships features nobody asked for, Keynote hands you a blank canvas and walks away, and Google Slides somehow manages to inherit the worst qualities of both. Turning your thinking into slides has become a second job, and it's no surprise people are reaching for AI tools that promise to skip the whole ordeal. The appeal is real. But AI is the wrong answer to a real problem.
The thing about presentations
A distinction worth making up front: AI is useful when it helps a speaker express their thinking more clearly. That means things like polishing phrasing, catching a typo, suggesting you move the third slide to the front because the argument flows better that way.
None of that is what this essay is about. What this essay is about is the use of AI to produce the substance of the talk itself, and specifically why that particular move goes wrong in a way it doesn't go wrong for a memo or a status update.
The reason is that a presentation is one of the few remaining forms where the whole point is that a specific person has thought about something and is now standing in a room saying it to other people. Slide decks aren't presentations. The deck is the visible trace of the thinking, the part the audience can see while you talk, and if there wasn't any thinking, the trace is empty no matter how good it looks.
And this is how AI hollows out a talk: letting a machine generate what was supposed to be your account of something, and then walking into a room to deliver it. What's left goes through all the motions of a presentation — you stand up, slides appear, you speak — but the thing the audience was there to receive isn't there. They came to hear you think. Instead, you're doing a performance of thinking in front of AI-generated photos and illustrations.
Audiences notice. Maybe not consciously, and maybe not in time to put words to it before the talk ends. But they register the phrasing that sounds like every other deck they've sat through this quarter, the art that has that weird AI look, the slides that are individually competent and collectively anonymous. By the middle of the talk, some part of the room is quietly wondering what else about this isn't yours.
The new clip art
We've been here before.
In the early 2000s, clip art played this role. There were these funny little cartoon pictures that people would insert like a smiling cartoon handshake next to the bullet about partnership. A cartoon lightbulb above "innovation." Audiences learned to read it for what it was: cheesy.
AI-generated decks are the same mistake at higher resolution. The output is vastly more polished, but the error underneath is the same one: confusing the visible surface of a presentation with the thing the presentation is supposed to be. A reader can often tell when someone has reached for decoration in place of substance, and in the end it doesn't matter much whether the decoration was a clip art lightbulb in 2003 or a Midjourney hero image in 2026.
How to make a great presentation in the age of AI
Be authentic. It's a sign of respect for your audience, and for your work.
You're better off with a plain slide deck with a few bulletpoints that reflect your thinking than something that looks beautiful and fake.
If you find it helpful, use AI to help you brainstorm and check your work before you get out there in front of your audience.