Death by Default: Which Google Slides Templates Are Actually Usable?
Google boasts how AI drives its OA, aka Workspace, apps. Yet there's a problem with this. Around the same time as the Institute for Public Policy Research found an alarming skew in the "narrow and inconsistent" sources used for bot answers, I noted the lack of savvy applied to Google Slides suggestions.
Whatever the extent its choice of templates are guided by algorithm, it suffers from similar general AI malaise.
Namely, an LLM trained on man-made slop serves up AI-made slop.
I've blogged on this before. Try conversing with a bot on an area in which you hold top percentile knowledge. Responses are nearly always a shambles. Yet we still believe for other areas outside our proficiency that it'll be expert. As mystifying as it is deluded.
With deck design, the obvious culprit is what you might term The Slideshare Effect.
As the largest and oldest freely accessed repository for presentations online, it seems pretty nailed on the bots have sucked that site all up.
Yet have you seen what's on it lately?
Yes, there are morsels of usefulness and actual, yunno best-practice, but the majority are, well, not so. Even if you get by those stuck in the 1990s, it's a graveyard of clipart, bullets and miniature text aplenty you ought truly avoid.
But AI does not realise this. There's a clear mismatched needle-in-haystack conundrum at play. As I myself see when engaging it on this issue, it has yet to separate that which appears most by volume from approaches which are actually audience wowing. A quality over quantity distinction eludes it.
Similar afflictions befall you on pretty much any tricky aspect of Sales, by the way. [Hence forgive me for a shameless plug if you have twenty quid to invest.]
Entering my slice of G-Slides offers up a side-panel of prompted templates. 89 of 'em, no less. Appearing in some kind of almost-groupings.
Presentation front pages for project timeline, business plans, ice-breakers, workshop facilitation, new team member, business review, competitive analysis, board meetings and even 'your showstopping product pitch' are offered.
Each and every one, sub-par. Worse than that. For our selling purpose they are worthless.
I'd love to be able to show templates that we could actually use.
There isn't one.
Even trying instead to squeeze life into at least some is fraught.
I've distilled all these down to a dozen. They are not - repeat, not - to be used. Although I did chuckle when I thought of doing my next deck in the style of lots of these. Deploying a fresh one for each subsequent slide of my deck with a client. In a theme of How Google AI Would Present. I could even pair them up, with the Don't Do Evil-ers first, then a fitting remix second.
Anyway, here's a dirty dozen. The point being, despite some not needing much in the way of remedy to fix, if your slides look like any of these, then you need at least to iterate, and possibly scrap it and start again.
