Kevin Surace argues AI's real value is freeing you from tedious work, not making you work harder. He feeds AI a presentation's purpose and audience, and gets a fully formatted slide deck in an hour instead of spending days on fonts and graphics. The satisfaction comes from delivering the talk, not the formatting.
What if the best use of AI isn't working more, but eliminating the work you hate so you can spend more time doing what you actually enjoy? Create presentations probably every day or every week. We have to create presentations. Well, now AI has finally gotten good enough where pretty much all of my presentation work is done by AI. I will lay out my opinion and what I want to present and how I want to present it and who I'm presenting to. I will suggest some additional research or recommend additional research, and then I will send it on its way. And an hour later, it'll ping me and say, I'm done. I've written your presentation, and the quality of the alignment of the fonts and the text that is used is better than I could do. And I used to spend a week preparing a presentation, even though I knew in the first hour what I wanted to present, but to get the graph right or the chart right or the text right. So what I realized is, in all of these things, my joy came from giving the presentation or sharing the presentation. There was actually no joy in Moving this font over here and changing the color of this letter and trying to get this over here so that it aligned. There's no joy in that whatsoever. It took this joyless multi-day effort and gave me all that time back to create better quality output. So I've realized that joy really comes from the outcome and the output, not necessarily from the doing. Even though you still could do it, you no longer need to. So AI gives us an opportunity to find more joy in our life.
