I have been using AI to help create a couple of microbiology-related educational presentations over the past few weeks, for the first time in a couple of years.

I shouldn’t have left it so long…

Things have clearly improved. AI technology is now evolving at an incredible rate. Pause for breath and you will be left behind. It is not perfect by any means but starting to become functional in the professional setting in many different facets, including presentations.

Here are a couple of my personal comments on using AI to generate microbiology presentations for teaching purposes.

• I used Co-Pilot to generate the presentations: Because I am old and stuck in my ways, I still use PowerPoint for all my presentations. As a result, it makes sense for me to use Co-Pilot, as this is also a Microsoft product and is thus designed to generate PowerPoint presentations. 
• Prompting is everything: A good initial “prompt ” is key in producing a good AI-generated presentation. How many slides do you want it to produce? Who is the target audience? What areas do you want it to focus on? Do you want it to reference the evidence for its statements? Do you want it to be humorous? Do you want it to include pictures/graphs/tables. Do you want it to include hypothetical case studies. Do you want it to produce MCQs on the topic at the end. And that is just for starters… I think in future I am going to develop a template prompt for presentations which I can then amend for each topic I need to teach on.
• It still has a tendency to produce generic presentations: My experience so far is that AI has a tendency to produce generic presentations. As I get better at prompting, hopefully I will get better at getting AI to include interesting details in the presentations and not “genericise” so much.
• Editing is key: The presentation it produces for you will never be exactly the way you want it, even with optimal prompting. Therefore, you will need to dedicate a significant amount of time to editing and polishing it, and indeed giving it a personal touch.
• Watch out for Hallucinations: In the AI age, hallucinations now have a very different meaning than back in my student days! Large Language Model (LLM) AI systems still have a tendency to make things up if they don’t know the answer. This flaw is becoming less common with more sophisticated software but watch out for it nevertheless. Bias can be another issue. My AI generated presentations did not have any evidence of hallucinations, but there were a couple of clear instances of bias which required editing.
• It is more difficult to present an AI generated presentation: Because you have not actually written the presentation yourself, it is more difficult to actually present it to an audience. So rehearsal is key. Usually, I would spend 3-4 hours writing a presentation then 1/2 hour rehearsing it. With AI, I would recommend 1/2 hour on the prompt, an hour editing and an hour rehearsing your presentation. AI does save time, but not as much as you might think.

Despite my amateurish initial attempts, I am going to persist with using AI for presentations. The technology can only continue to improve, and very quickly at that. The presentations that it can produce now are light years ahead of what it could do a couple of years ago. I am keen to get tips from anyone else experimenting with giving microbiology presentations by AI. I would also encourage all my colleagues to give it a go.

Several of my children have already been “pinged” at school for using AI in their assignments. Being the bad parent that I am, I ignore the teachers’ frustrations and let the kids embrace the technology as much as they are able. This is the future whether the teachers like it or not…

Michael