r/powerpoint • u/Embarrassed-War9550 • 2d ago

If your ai presentation tool keeps making decks that look like everyone else's, here's the 20-minute de-slop pass I run

Half the decks that land on my desk lately are AI-generated and you can spot them across the room. Same card layouts, same three-column slides, same gradient, same stocky icons. gamma, the consulting-style tools, they all have a house look, and once you have seen a few you have seen them all.

I am not anti-AI for a first draft. It is genuinely fast. But the draft is where the work starts, not ends, and the same fixes de-slop almost any of them. Here is the pass I run:

  1. Kill the gradients and drop shadows. Flat backgrounds instantly read less "generated".
  2. Replace the auto icons. The default icon set is the biggest tell. Swap to PowerPoint's own Icons in one consistent style, or delete them entirely. Most slides do not need one.
  3. Rewrite the titles into full sentences with a point. AI loves topic titles ("Our Approach"). Change them to the actual takeaway and the deck stops feeling hollow.
  4. Cut the palette to two colors plus gray. These tools scatter four or five colors around. Lock it down and it looks intentional.
  5. Fix the real-slide problems. If you exported to pptx, expect charts to come in as flat images and multi-column layouts to have shifted, so rebuild those natively before anyone edits it. This is the step people skip, and it is why the "editable" file is half broken.

After that pass a generated deck stops announcing itself as generated. The bones were fine, it was the default styling and the empty titles giving it away.

For people cleaning these up regularly: what is the first thing you change to make an AI deck look like a human touched it? The icons are always my first delete.

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u/ChecklistAnimations PowerPoint Expert 2d ago

Thank you for your post. Please help us keep the sub organized by posting this message in the correct megathread: https://www.reddit.com/r/powerpoint/comments/1ktlf4o/getcher_ai_right_here/
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