Antonym: The PowerPoint PTSD Edition
Be careful what you wish for (if an AI chatbot is listening)
Dear Reader
I must warn you that the following article contains an image that is a little – perhaps more than a little – disturbing. Of the many things I hoped Google’s AI for its PowerPoint competitor Slides would be able to do, pushing me to the very edge of madness itself was not one of them.
Google’s par-baked AI
Earlier this week I turned on Google Duet, a set of generative AI enhancements for Docs, Drive, Gmail, Slides etc. For $30 a month per user for business users, it really doesn’t seem like good value. The alternative – using AI tools and then bringing the results in to your mail, documents etc seems like much better value.
Good things about Duet:
Transcription on Google Meetings – OK, maybe Otter level, but not as good Grain.
“Proofing” feature in Google Docs, which is pretty damn useful, although Google should probably buy Lex.page as soon as possible as they’ve already added a pretty useful writing coach. That said, the prospect of putting Grammarly – which Duet is at least no worse than – to rest cheers me up.
Not-so-good things about Duet:
Half-finished doesn’t begin to describe it. This thing could barely be called a beta. Features have to be hunted for or teased out from the menu. Then there’s an awful lot of “I can’t do that I’m still learning” and inconsistent results.
Image generation for Slides: embarrassingly bad. Take a look at this attempts to recreate the classic Antonym “Turkeys voting for Chrixit” cover image:
For comparison, here’s the one I knocked together in MidJourney ($12 a month), with a little polishing in Adobe Firefly Beta (a lot a month?).
The Google Slides version is the kind of nightmarish concoction – and it was the best of a horrific bunch – you’d get from image generators a couple of years ago, and put beside the promise of OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 powers.
Meanwhile Microsoft announced its ChatGPT-powered Office tools would be available from Tuesday 26th (next Tuesday at the time of writing).
I will reserve judgement until I’ve tried Microsoft’s Office tools, but for now I think Google may be in trouble.
How to business-trip with AI
One thing I didn’t get to share last week (sorry, missed you too) about my adventures in Munich was the way that I used AI tools to support me while there.
City guide: I haven’t had a great experience with travel agent AI bots yet. They didn’t make booking a holiday this summer amu. On the ground while on a business trip, though – yes, very useful. I had a few hours before my hotel room was available so I wanted somewhere to work. Search engines can be very hit and miss on this sort of thing, dominated by SEO’d co-working websites and the like when you just want some advice. Perplexity Pro gave me plenty of options, from the public library to an ad agency which apparently lets nomadic workers drop in and grab a desk for a few hours. I also played with some ideas of things to do, which, had I had time to go exploring, sounded like fun.
Preparing to attend. Conferences often have parallel tracks of speakers and choosing the right one is tricky without knowing much about the people talking. I used a Notion to quickly build a database from the conference programme (copy and paste the list) and then Perplexity again to add in biographies of speakers, their companies and things they had recently written or talks they’d given. This context made it easier to choose where to be and which talks I really had to make sure I didn’t miss.
The best notes. Otter.ai was superb for recording the sessions and adding in photos of speakers and slides. Afterwards the transcripts can be cleaned up and summarised well using Claude or ChatGPT.
Curating the knowledge. Back at the office, the challenge is sharing what I learned in an efficient way. We converted the database I’d knocked together in Notion into a curated set of notes, adding in the organiser’s videos, summaries and biographies of speakers. Running through my notes and otter transcripts was a relatively speedy task. I was able to organise the headlines into insights which we used in our newsletter and used AI again to do a first draft of an article of this.
Looking back, I can see there are more things I could have done to save time and make the most of the learning as I went. Some of these things can be automated or delegated ahead of time to make the investment of time and attention return a little more than they would have, both by making the things I learned more readily available to me, more applicable and shareable.
Free things for you
Early this week, Antonym’s human-half – me, I, myself – will be appearing on The Major Difference’s second ever episode. I had a good chat with James from Major Digital (former agency neighbours of Brilliant Noise) about the vibes from DLD, the survival chances for our species and how to endure the fifteenth interview in Mustafa Suleyman’s carpet-bombing-of-our-feeds publicity tour for the (very good)The Coming Wave.
This coming Wednesday I’m going to be presenting the second of Brilliant Noise’s webinars. We’re going for a live YouTube session this time, for which I don’t have the URL yet, but you can sign up on LinkedIn if you’d like to come along. Doubtless I will be posting the video here too next week.
And speaking of videos – here are a couple promotional videos featuring clips from the last webinar (the whole thing is available here).
An airbag for your attention span
A bad app habit – opening one and scrolling without thinking about it – can be a car crash for your attention, an energy drain in so many ways.
The LinkedIn App on my iPhone has oddly been a problem for me of late. I mean TikTok too, but to find oneself compulsively scrolling LinkedIn is desperately sad. My son saved me. He has a clever little app called One Sec which I installed (a little fiddly on the settings, but doable). The app is brilliant – it creates a gap between your opening an app and it starting, which lets your conscious mind take back over and – more often than not – decide “no, I don’t want to look at it right now”.
As you can see, it also tells you when you last viewed the app and how many times you have tried to look. It’s immediately effective and as an added bonus, taking a “mindful breath” instead of mindlessly scrolling through stuff is actually very calming.
One Sec is free to block one app, and then there’s a fee for more.
A couple of wonderful things
There’s too many things to write about this week, so just popping these here:
This visual explanation by the FT of how Gen AI's generative bit works. Why does this work as an article? The illustrations are helpful, but it is also the episodic feeling, the breaking up of a lengthy text with different styles of description, visual and textual.
The brilliant content expert Lauren Pope’s list of tools she uses in her work is very useful indeed.
How the infopocalyse will happen
A book review last week in New Scientist covered Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave (which we mentioned last week) and a couple of intriguing books I’d not heard of: Deterrence Under Uncertainty by Edward Geist (Oxford University Press) and The Handover by David Runciman (Profile Books).
Geist is concerned with the important issue of how misinformation will be made more potent as a tactic by AI.
Geist, steeped in the history and craft of deception as a specialist in defence policy and security, thinks even the smartest agent can be made self-destructively stupid by subterfuge. Fakery is so cheap and effective that Geist envisions a future where AI-driven “fog-of-war machines” create a world that favours neither side, but backs “those who seek to confound”.
In Geist’s hands, Suleyman’s “infocalypse” is a far cleaner and cheaper weapon than any bomb. Imagine future wars using mind games. In such a shifting world, people could be persuaded their adversary doesn’t want to hurt them. Rather than living in fear, they would see the adversary’s values are, and always have been, better than theirs.
Depending on your politics and sensitivity to disinformation, you may feel this future is already upon us. And, says Geist, at his most Machiavellian, “would it not be much more preferable for one’s adversaries to decide one had been right all along, and welcome one’s triumph?
This week I’ve been…
Reading…
Into the last few pages of Demon Copperhead, I’m torn between wanting to get to the end, deep fear for the main character and pre-grieving not reading it. It’s very likely my book of the year.
I’ve also cracked into Elon by Walter Isaacson, assured by the reports that Isaacson isn’t pulling his punches and keen to understand a little more about this Massive Randomising Influence on the World.
Listening…
The News Agents on Russell Brand. An interview with former “friend” and repentant Sun Showbiz editor Gordon Smart who once awarded him the “shagger of the year award”.
Beyond this conversation, the number of mentions of conspiracy-adjacent views heard in everyday conversations has been troubling. Everyday conversations include ideas “big media (the BBC) wants revenge” and “the establishment” being out to get him are themes straight from his off-YouTube talking points. David Aaronovitch has some sane analysis of these unconsciously radicalising views.
Watching…
True Detective Series 3 (Now TV).
Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff build an atmosphere of dread amid gritty police work and a story-line that hops between three timelines deftly. Recaptures some of the reality bending qualities of series one, which is an all time classic.
The Telemarketers (Now TV)
Oh wow. This is something else.
Actual documentary, but the making of it and the subject matter sound like a movie pitch in their own right: Desperate people recruited as the foot-soldiers of the mother of all telemarketing scams turn themselves into documentary filmmakers to expose the scam.
The Morning Show series 3 (Apple TV+)
Frothy surface fun with super-high production values, The Morning Show also has hidden depths and takes on challenging issues. Now out of the shadow of the former presenter who was a sexual predator, it is taking on systemic racism. One of the first shows commissioned for Apple TV+, the product placement is shameless. People are desperately wedded to their phones. There's a look of deep relief when a presenter comes off set and is handed her 14 Pro Max by an assistant. The promotion also runs to education pieces on how to use iPhones. In a recent episode, Jennifer Anniston demonstrates the correct way to dictate to the phone, ending a sentence by saying "question mark".
That’s all for this week. If you like it could ya put a share on it? Thanks.
Antony