ZD 25.06: Presenting With AI
How to make AI a useful presentation partner.
Interconnections and tariff engineering explained. Does fact checking work? Champions league and stadium design. And how you can get from notes to slides with AI.
The Distilled Spirit
Powerful Economic Engineering
⚡ Inside the Interconnection Queue ()
The good news is that there are more gigawatts of power projects waiting to come online in the US than currently exist. The bad news is that it can take five or more years to connect your power plant project to the grid. Hopefully we can find ways to speed permitting up to get these projects delivered as fast as possible.
⚒ Tariff Engineering Explained (
)Lots of products have features due to the letter of the law. Converse shoes were felt covered and Subaru made the BRAT to land in more favorable tariff classes. Beyond the successes, there are a number of failures where companies were caught circumventing the regime. Moreover, closing the de minimis loophole is probably a good thing given the waves of unsafe and illegal products that came in through that door.
Do You Even Fact Check Bro?
🤷♀️ Does Fact Checking Even Work? (Torment Nexus)
Fact checking sounds like a great idea on paper but it has a fatal flaw — we have to agree on a set of facts to be the truth. When that truth is not agreed upon it can even make things worse by casting the fact checking as part of the underlying conspiracy. Perhaps this is an unsolvable problem — centralized fact checking does not scale.
📝 The Making of Community Notes (Asterisk Magazine)
The team that built X’s community notes feature sits for a group interview and reveals how the sausage was made. Being a stealth team of sorts working with a small set of users and having permission to ship quickly really helped the process. It seems that the new tool has been fairly effective while maintaining community trust.
Sporting News
⚽ The Updated Champions League Format is Great ()
I was not looking forward to the updated, swiss tournament style UEFA Champions League group stage. I had good company like Grace. I am happy to say we were both wrong. The final day was a football spectacle I will be looking forward to next year. The format really worked — there were more, better games. The knockouts should be exciting and they start today on Paramount Plus.
🏟 Stadium Engineering ()
Stadiums are marvels of modern engineering, with roofs supported by air and are carefully engineered to give the maximum pitch for visibility without making people feel sick. At least we don’t have to build around 55 yard lines.
From Notes to Slides with AI
A common question I receive is, “How can AI help me make a great presentation?” Just like every technology beforehand, AI cannot make up for not knowing the subject matter. But it can help you be a better storyteller and presenter. Here are some tools and techniques you can use to get your ideas across to others more effectively.
It starts with a story
You need a good outline for any of these tools to be truly effective. This is where ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or whatever chatbot you use comes in. You are probably already using AI for some parts of your writing process. AI is especially useful in transforming raw notes into a structured and coherent story. Having a conversation with it about the subject and to help you define the takeaways of your presentation is a superpower.
The other angle chatbots can help you with is feedback. Having them read your outline and reflect your main points is a great way to help make sure you are moving in the right direction. Perplexity and to some extent ChatGPT can help verify facts by cross-referencing multiple sources and summarizing common understandings, though they should be supplemented with primary sources for accuracy. Even more powerful is using AI tools to challenge your assumptions. Make sure to ask what problems the audience could see with your presentation. Asking someone to poke holes in your logic is very powerful.
Sourcing Art
Sharp visuals are important for any great deck. With AI generated art, everyone can have very sharp visuals without a huge investment or needing access to an art department. My go to is usually ChatGPT with its embedded Dalle3. I think it is better for someone like me who does not really know what he wants it to look like. Custom GPTs can process uploaded images to create a style library, even if you lack design expertise. It makes it pretty easy to carry an artistic theme throughout a presentation.
For more advanced artwork requirements I would look at Leonardo.ai. They have lots of options, knobs, bells, and whistles. Leonardo is especially useful if you are presenting about a specific person, object, or place and want to apply different AI styles to a given background or reference image. For example, if you are giving a presentation on historical figures, you could use Leonardo.ai to generate stylized portraits based on historical references, ensuring a cohesive and visually appealing theme throughout your slides. There the app has superpowers and makes it easy for someone with a minimal set of graphics management skills to create high-quality content.
For many presentations you really need diagrams not art. That is where Napkin.ai shines. It is a tool that generates diagrams from selected text you share with it. Imagine asking for an artist to draw up the four bullet points that make up slide 32 and you get the idea. It proposes a bunch of different formats and then, once a format is selected, a number of color schemes. Once you see their style you will realize how many folks on Substack are using the tool to enhance their publications. I know this one has. One other nice thing is that, while in beta, Napkin is free to use for now.
Gamma is Great
I have tried many different AI presentation generation tools in my days. Very few of them have been worth mentioning. Beautiful.ai showed some promise but was ultimately not quite good enough. Copilot on PowerPoint keeps wanting to be helpful but it is not quite there yet. Then I tried Gamma the other week and I came away very impressed. It is the first thing I have seen that did a good job of taking an outline and, with little more than setting a few sliders, created a deck I would call almost presentation ready. The tool still is not quite perfect — it has definitely missed some more nuanced points in my tests. But it does a good job of taking your content from page to deck. The package has a bit of range — it can also dress up your one pager from a plain jane word document to a glossy leave-behind. It will take your branding on, at least to some extent, if you need to stay within a color palette.
Gamma gets a lot of things right — the tool excels at slide organization, visual aesthetics, and effectively structuring content to match your outline, making it a strong choice for creating a well-organized and engaging presentation. Tweaking is relatively straightforward, and you can make it selectively re-generate or add pages where needed. They did a good job thinking of outputs and how this would be used — you can aim for dynamic screen graphics or standard sizes. Overall the tool feels very useful out of the box.
The app looks like a keeper, but there is one flaw I wanted to flag. The usage policy seems a bit tilted towards them. For example, their terms grant them broad rights to user-generated content, which may include reuse or modification without explicit permission. This could be a concern for proprietary or confidential materials. I would be careful with anything too sensitive or important long-term until their terms of service get worked over a bit. Really worth the look — and an inspiration for what could be — but caveat emptor on that front. And warning noted, the tool is good enough for a16z so it is probably good enough for you and me.
Getting the Point Across
AI is a real help in crafting presentations. Using it up-front to develop the ideas pays off throughout the process — the cleaner your instructions, the better your creative tools will be able to serve you. Understanding what to write is key, and that is shaped by feedback AI can give very effectively. You can use it to create visuals — both art and diagrams — to get your point across. You can even leverage a tool like Gamma to pull it all together for you.
The Look
Is it time to invest in space lasers? The chances of an asteroid collision with earth have crossed an uncomfortable 1% threshold.
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