As in many other areas (e.g. code, emails, PRs, blog posts), people have started using LLMs to generate slides for their conference talks (e.g., set of HTML pages as a talk).

On the one hand, the slides look tidy, neat, and precise, with infographics, plots, dashboards, and so on. Nothing to complain about.

On the other hand, they look, hm, like LLM generated web sites, like soulless, if I may say so. I don't know why, but I don't enjoy reading them, even though they probably provide more value than hand crafted.

What's your current take?

I have the opposite experience. I have used single HTML page LLM generated slides for demos/presentations, but they were designed in a manner to tell a story in an easy to understand way with animations and aesthetically pleasing manner. So far I have only gotten positive feedback because for most people it was easy to follow the story I wanted to tell and be engaged rather than staring at a power-point slides.

I guess it heavily depends on how much effort and refinement you put into when creating it regardless if you use an LLM or not. I always ask my self would I fall asleep if someone else presented these slides to me, and if the answer is yes, then I keep on refining it till it meets my standard

Slides are already soulless. This is one of the use cases where it makes far more sense to let an AI do its thing vs. spending time doing it yourself. Heck, one of my worst job experiences ever was at a place that would call planning meetings to talk about what should go on the slide deck... for a planning meeting to create a slide deck for a presentation to the VPs. Not even the C-suite.

When I talk about AI having places where it is the right answer, and places where it is the wrong answer... slide decks are probably the easiest place to say "yes, use AI."

As far as whether or not it makes the presenters look lazy... I think slide decks always looked lazy. Slide-driven leadership is a real thing, and it is bad.

Management at my company have started using AI to generate slides, reports, you name it. And it’s clear they didn’t create or even read them properly. It comes off as lazy and unprofessional. Like, it’s your job to create this stuff and you’re not spending time on it.