ChatGPT can be a useful productivity tool for presentations:

  • Get a basic story line / section outline for. a presentation

  • Improve the language of a text

  • Etc.

When using it, it is important to understand what underlying technology it uses, so you can see understand where it is strong, and where it is not.

  • ChatGPT predicts words based on your prompt and the previous words it has already generated. Therefore, it is really good at “completing” texts that are very common on the Internet. High school essays, business plans, corporate annual reports, product documentations, product reviews, computer code. If your presentation fits one of these, it will work great, if it does not, results are not very reliable.

  • ChatGPT cannot yet do live web searches to enrich its answers. Everything it “knows” is based on its training data set that was cut off in September 2021. Any information that became available after that, is not incorporated in the results.

  • The majority of text available online is in English, so results in other languages will not be as strong.

Back in the early 2000s, Yahoo! was trying to categorize the Internet. Google beat it with a simple approach of tracking to which site other sites point for a certain subject. ChatGPT is a sort of super template: instead of looking for / categorizing text in templates, it simply reads all the templates and predicts what sentence is most likely to come next given the previous ones.

So “generic” presentations are most likely to benefit from ChatGPT. Quarterly budgets, CVs and bios, results from a science project, product launches. But even startup presentations can be pretty generic. Think about a pitch deck of SAAS (software as a service company) that has revenues and can fill pages with data about the typical financial ratios that investors are looking for.

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