Connect with us

Artificial Intelligence

Is GenAI The New Powerpoint?

People are getting excited about the power of generative AI to create new kinds of presentations.

As we reported a few weeks ago, PDF-to-podcast is one of the hottest applications of new LLM models.

What’s most thrilling, to many new users, is the ability of the program to generate real-sounding human voices that aren’t attached to real people. In other words, there aren’t any real actual podcasters on the other side of the microphone. It’s all generated through the power of those generative processes that we’ve recently learned to use, all based on that principle of learned originality – in other words, the ability of programs to look at a wide body of work and then synthesize something new.

But they laugh, and joke, and clown around, just like real podcasters! We heard about this phenomenon from Will.i.am at an event earlier this year, as he pioneered this kind of thing on his show with his digital co-host, Fiona. But now that technology is going public.

 

You can see a relevant code project on GitHub, or read about all the applications of this technology at any of the venues where reporters are covering the intense human interest in this type of automated generation. (Or you can red from one of our own contributors, Rachel Wells, about 5 popular tools that offer this kind of functionality.)

But you could also ask yourself: how does this change the nature of what we show each other as humans?

The PowerPoint Era

Some of us are old enough to remember the advent of PowerPoint not that many years ago. As the Internet matured, and visual graphic interfaces evolved, we started to get tools that helped us to create slick, powerful presentations to show off in boardrooms, in classrooms, in conference halls, and anywhere that the occasion called for a formal set of slides or ‘presentation deck.’

Prior to PowerPoint, (a few more years back), presenters were using analog transparency machines, casting actual printed pages against the wall using a powerful light.

Some of us remember that, too.

When PowerPoint came out, a lot of its appeal was the ease of use, and the striking results you could come up with just by creating your own layout with relatively simple tools.

in a way, PowerPoint was a lot like simple HTML websites – you plug in all the components and lay them out, and you have your presentation.

Importantly, though, all of it was generated by the human. Many of us might remember getting together with a group of students to plan a PowerPoint presentation for a class. The slides were your blank slate – what you put on them was your business, and determined your grade and the quality of your presentation.

Those questions have yet to be answered, but the final result is that we’ve gained the ability to basically create presentations ‘ex nihilo,’ out of nothing, or more accurately, out of the collective gestalt of what other people have already made.

It’s not just that the AI can generate images. It can take very vague subjects and write headlines and summaries, and basically plan out a presentation conceptually, too.

This is part of what people are getting at when they talk about AI as akin to fire or electricity. It’s a power of its own that takes over what had been human jurisdictions for all of the centuries of human life. Relatively recently, humans were scrabbling in the dirt, and hunting for animals, and writing things on cave walls, or later, parchments.

 

Source : https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwerner/2024/10/16/is-genai-the-new-powerpoint

Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Copyright © 2022 Inventrium Magazine

%d bloggers like this: