Ditch the Image Hunt: AI Simplifies PowerPoint Illustrations

This is another installment of my series of short articles sharing simple ways I’ve found to use AI LLMs (large language models) to improve effectiveness and efficiency in my daily personal and professional tasks. My objective is to encourage you, if you haven’t already, to bring AI into your life so that you can become familiar with and understand how you can put this rapidly improving technology to use to make you better and more productive.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent more time than you’d like to admit searching Google Images for just the right visual to add impact and interest to your PowerPoint presentation. Sometimes you find the right image in 1 minute and sometimes it takes 15 minutes to find what you need. Well the good news is that AI image generation is improving rapidly and in my opinion it’s ready for primetime to get you the right picture, developed to your personal specification, literally in seconds. Each of the following examples were generated by me on ChatGPT 4o Image Generator. Find the image generator inside the ChatGPT 4o app under the “Explore GPTs” section and just prompt the app with a short written description of the image you need.

Example 1:

Prompt: Create an image of a desktop containing a laptop, a cell phone, a pen and several stacks of paper. The POV of the image should be from the person sitting at the desk.

Example 2:

Prompt: Create an image of a busy urban intersection with a traffic light signaling red. The weather is rainy and the POV of the image should be from street level.

Example 3:

Prompt: Create an image of a F1 race car screaming through a turn on a racetrack

Hey, these images are not 100% photo realistic, but in my opinion they are more than sufficient to illustrate a point and create visual interest in most PowerPoint presentations - and the capabilities of these image functions are improving rapidly. Also keep in mind these images were just the initial responses to the various prompts and I can always tweak them by instructing the model to update the image with follow up instructions such as (for the image of the urban intersection) “update the image to show sunny and clear weather conditions.”

Simple, quick, customized illustrations delivered right to your desktop. In my opinion this is a super practical time-saving tool for anyone who regularly creates presentations in PowerPoint or Google Slides. Try it! If I can do it then so can you!