I confess, I hate powerpoint.
I further confess that I hate the current field of “AI” and it’s focus on LLMs.
That said, I’ve come to terms with powerpoint. Perhaps that’s a function of working more as a VP than as an engineer. Perhaps it’s a function of working with Product for whom powerpoint is the primary method of communication and a way to document designs, requirements, and ideas. Regardless, I tend to stand with Tufte that powerpoint has its own cognitive style and that the style is ineffective at communicating complicated ideas (and kills astronauts).
With respect to LLMs, there are a lot of good reasons to hate them. There’s the environmental and power consumption issues. There’s the destruction of your ability for critical thought. There’s the slop that’s generated and is spilling over to our online places. IP theft in their creation. Massive debt structures that will blow up the economy. I can go on. But the thing that’s becoming more and more frustrating to me is workload asymmetry.
When I talk about workload asymmetry, what I’m getting at is that we have two classes of people in the workplace right now. Those using AI and those abstaining. Those abstaining from AI are generally doing so because they (we) care about our work. We note that a report is not the product, it’s the output of the process. A powerpoint (grr…) is not (should not) be created for its own sake, but instead exists to communicate an idea (however poorly the medium is suited for it). Generalizing, but the people using AI to generate work product these days seem to care about the existance of the artifact and not the thought that went into it.
I have a high-level employee who proudly told me that he’s gotten “good at creating powerpoints – he justs asks copilot,” and then he presents 30-40 slides of slop-ridden garbage. So, yes, he’s produced his artifact in only an hour or two of work that might have previously taken a day; but the result doesn’t seem to convey any information. And now I have to review the document in great detail to try to understand the point he was trying to convey before it was garbalized by copilot.
It used to be that one would spend hours or a day on a set of slides to ensure they communicated the exact point you intended and that the point was easily understood with a minimum of effort by the audience. But now we have an attractive set of slides that are easy to make, but difficult to understand and care about.
By the time I’m done understanding the copilot generated slides, the person in question has already generated another deck and those of us who care about the meaning and the thought behind the workplace artifact are losing ground to those who just care about pretending to have done work.
I’m not sure where this will take us, but my next step is to just toss the slides into copilot and prompt it to respond, but it may be better for the world to just start using the acronym “AI;DR”