You Ask, I Answer: Why Can't AI Make a Nice Slide Deck?

In today’s episode, you’ll uncover the reasons behind the challenges AI faces in creating truly compelling slide decks. You’ll learn about the limitations of current AI architectures and how they hinder the seamless integration of text and visuals. I’ll also explore the fascinating interplay between reason and creativity and how it affects AI’s ability to craft presentations that are both logical and engaging. Tune in to gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of AI and its potential for future development in the realm of visual storytelling.

You Ask, I Answer: Why Can't AI Make a Nice Slide Deck?

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In today’s episode, literally everyone asks the question, “Why can’t AI make a compelling slide deck? Why can we not make a presentation with generative AI?”

And the answer to this question is complicated. It’s complicated for two reasons.

Number one is an architectural reason. There’s two major architectures of generative AI models right now: there’s one called transformers, and one called diffusers.

Transformers is the architecture that powers many tools like ChatGPT, for example. And what they are is they are token predictors: given a series of input tokens—like pieces of words—they can predict the next word in a sequence. Given a strain of DNA, they can predict what the next base pairs are going to be. Given a sequence of musical notes, they can predict what the next musical note is going to be based on all the data they’ve been trained on. That token prediction is linear, it’s sequential, and it’s based on the context of everything that’s seen before. That’s how a tool like ChatGPT does what it does.

Diffusers, which is the other major architecture that powers tools like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion or DALL-E, are image generators that take a bunch of noise, take some words that have known associated images with them, and then start scraping away pixels until what’s left behind—what’s left behind is ideally aligned to kind of what the prompt was— a dog on a skateboard or something like that.

These two models work very, very differently. And they don’t talk to each other. They don’t talk to each other well. They have difficulty understanding what’s going on. Even multimodal models, like Google’s Gemini, for example, aren’t really truly multimodal in that they can make a round trip. And here’s what I mean.

Go into ChatGPT and say, “Hey, make a picture of a Toyota Prius with four people sitting in the car.” And every time I’ve done this, it comes up with a picture of three people. I’m like, “But it’s four people! I said four people.” It says, “Here’s your picture,” and it’s got sort of three people in it.

Why is it doing this? Because a transformers model can’t see what a diffusers model publishes, and vice versa. There’s no round trip. Transformers can’t see what diffusers have made; diffusers have no true, useful understanding of language. And so these architectures are incompatible.

Now, will that change? Yes.

There are already some laboratory models called transfusion models. There’s also ones called visual language models—there’s one from a Chinese company called Quin that are getting more capable at starting to understand what they see. Pick Straw is another example of a blended visual language model.

And so the architecture issues are going to start getting better. There’s another reason why this is difficult for these AI models, and that has to do with reason versus creativity.

When you’re putting together a presentation, there’s a fair amount of reasoning that goes into it, logic. There’s things like, “Okay, what is the—what is the way to tell the story? What are the beginning, middle, and end of the pathways we want to lead people down? If we want to communicate effectively, we have to tell a story. It has to have a logical flow, some kind of sequencing that makes sense.”

And then we also have to be creative, right? We have to have unique, creative takes on things to make our story and our slides and our presentation compelling. No one wants to watch the same old thing. People want something fresh and new.

Reason and creativity are kind of at opposite ends of the spectrum. Reason is very high-probability things. It’s saying, “Okay, that’s the next most logical thing. What’s the next most logical slide in the slide deck?” Creativity is like, “What’s the unexpected thing that we could throw in that would make this presentation surprising and compelling?”

It’s—uh, I was in my series that I did with my friend Ruby King talking about music, there’s—you can make music that’s highly logical, highly high-probability. It’s boring to listen to because there’s nothing that’s a surprise. You can make music that is highly creative that has all sorts of key changes and tempo changes and things where you listen to it like, “Oh, that’s different. That’s not what I was expecting,” within reason.

And that reason versus creativity is part of the reason why generative AI can’t really do both well at the same time. You have to almost do passes where there’s a reasoning pass to go through first to establish the story, and then there’s a creativity pass, perhaps from a different model that can go through and improve the creativity.

So there’s architecture reasons, and then there’s sort of conceptual reasons why generative AI has so much trouble with a task like building a compelling slide deck.

Will that get better? Yes, over time, it will get better as tools improve for true multimodality. As tools are trained and models are trained on the process of making slide decks, it will improve over time. But right now, it’s still a very hard thing for these tools to do.

So it’s a good question. It’s an important question because it highlights how—how these tools are, in many ways, not like us, not like the way we think. And the sooner we understand that, the deeper we understand that, the better results we’re going to get.

Thanks for the question. Talk to you on the next one. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button. Subscribe to my channel if you haven’t already. And if you want to know when new videos are available, hit the bell button to be notified as soon as new content is live.

You Ask, I Answer: Why Can’t AI Make a Nice Slide Deck?

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