My favorite ChatGPT use case: presentation prep!

OK, I’m pretty skeptical when it comes to using generative AI (I believe that’s quite a healthy attitude when you work with the technology on a daily basis, and possibly also a result of that same activity), but there’s one use case where ChatGPT not only saves me time, but a lot of stress and frustration. And that’s when I need to prepare a presentation.

Eternal procrastination

As you may probably know, I’m an eternal procrastinator. Not because I don’t want to start on time, but because my presentation prep is such that I first need to hear the story in my head. And that’s something that I do while walking, shopping, cleaning the bathroom… It doesn’t come when I sit at my desk.

Another problem is that my thoughts are usually so all over the place that it takes me a long time to get to something that’s structured enough to put into a story with a beginning and an end.

So I usually just start recording empty powerpoint slides until my story is coherent enough to catch into words, and then add those to each slide. And I really, really dislike this part of the process, it causes me a lot of stress and doesn’t fit the way my head works.

4 hours to go…procrastination paralysis

Last Friday, I gave a 20 minute talk for over 120 French technical communicators about why tech writers make great prompt designers. It’s a topic that I’m extremely familiar with, love talking about and have a clear opinion on. But even though the event itself was lovely, I had left things to the last moment again, and a slight, nagging sense of impending doom was creeping up from the pit of my stomach. It was Friday morning, I had 4 hours left, and knew I really had to get up and do this. And I couldn’t come up with a single coherent thought.

ChatGPT to the rescue

So I stayed in bed a bit longer. And tried something else.

I started ChatGPT in voice mode and explained that I’m supposed to give a 20 minute talk about why tech writers make great prompt designers.
Then I asked it to listen carefully to me without interruption until I said ‘stop’, and after that to help me structuring this into a coherent story.
Next, I started an incoherent rambling session for exactly 20 minutes.
I let ChatGPT give its feedback. It wasn’t any good, to be honest, but I guess that was just the kind of reality check I needed.
I did another 2 rounds of exactly 20 minutes.

With each round, my story got more coherent and clear — a textbook example of an AI feedback loop in action. And by the end of round three, not only did I have a clear story in my head, I also had full transcriptions of each round, allowing me to copy paste ideas from earlier rounds for a quick refinement.

Real power: fit the process to how my head works

But the real power was that this way of working fit seamlessly with my non-linear head. Talking without distraction. But with the knowledge that something was ‘listening’, and that everything I said would be there waiting for me at the end of each session.

I did ask Chat to use my transcripts to create speaker notes and suggestions for slides as well, but the results were kind of ‘meh’. But that’s probably also because I was now at the point where I start enjoying the process, so I had enough inspiration to create my own slides from there.

In all, this shortened a process that could easily take a week of on-and-off low-key panicking to a hyper-focused 2 hour preparation session. Definitely something I’m going to do for my future presentations!

What about you? What are your favorite generative AI use cases? Do you have any characteristics that ChatGPT works particularly well with?