386 Thrashing AI When Presenting In Japan

THE Presentations Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

I was in a recent debate with the Dale Carnegie organisation about approving the publication of my new book “Japan Leadership Mastery”. There were concerns about copyright, because I was drawing on the Dale Carnegie curriculum for the book. A book is a powerful content marketing tool, so excluding the Dale Carnegie oeuvre defeats the purpose. One argument I made to them was I could rewrite the book and strip their content out and replace it with generic stuff summoned up from AI. This is the problem we all face. AI makes originality very difficult to sustain when it is so easy to coagulate all that is currently out there.

I create these podcast episodes every Saturday morning and when you have composed over three hundred articles on presentations, it gets harder and harder to come up with something original. I try to find angles I haven’t explored before and to write them in a way which an AI prompt could not replicate.

When we are creating our public presentations, we face the same problem. Any fool armed with AI can come up with a presentation which will assemble the best of what has been published already or at least what the machine could find from public sources. How do we make sure that what we are presenting is not getting pushed down into the sludge to battle with what AI can churn out in under a minute? How can we thrash our AI powered competitors within an inch of their lives?

At this point in time, we are lucky that most of the AI production for presentations is generic and sounds generic. Originality for me means the choices of words like “thrash”, “oeuvre”, “coagulate”, “sludge”, and “churn”. These are unlikely candidates to emerge from an AI prompt to create a presentation on any subject. I have always tried to write like this anyway, to make myself stand out from the crowd. Today that AI assisted crowd is surging. In fact, it is accessing the entire global production of text on every topic.

Don’t panic yet. Our experiences are sacrosanct turf, which protects us from AI mindlessness. No AI prompt can capture what has happened to us and our recollection of it. In our storytelling, we access those incidents and we use them in concert with our take on the lessons from what happened. This is a guaranteed way to remain one step ahead of AI generated content. Of course, AI can magically bring forth a slew of stories of other people’s experiences, but as a presenter relating to an audience what happened to us is unbeatable for making that human connection.

I resisted sharing a lot of personal insights and experiences for a long time. I am a very private person, an introvert in fact, who has to operate as an extrovert. It is always tough. People who know me would never know that because I push myself in public to be outgoing. When I finally got over myself and started including more things about me and my family in my talks, I noticed that I connected more powerfully with the audience. AI won’t know that level of detail and so can never match us in a live situation.

The other arena in which to slay the AI dragon is when we are on stage, standing there in front of a live audience. Our rival presenter may have been fed a steady diet of homogenised content from AI in prepping their talk, but can they rock the audience like we can?

This is where knowledge and execution diverge. It is the same with technical presenters. They have all the data, statistics, details, etc., but they speak in a monotone and murder their listeners. They are dull dogs, with way too much micro data plastered all over their one slide, which in fact should have been spread over six slides. They are unable to create some buzz with the crowd. They have no clue how to penetrate that invisible barrier between speaker and those being spoken to.

They don’t know how to bring gesture, voice tone, body language and eye contact together in an unstoppable vortex to completely capture the room and drive in their message. No amount of AI prep will help them. This is where the AI powered speaker runs out of gas. They can put up the bare bones of the AI generated presentation, but they don’t have the ability to flesh it out and make it a triumph.

When you know what you are doing, you can dip into elements of AI for help, but for presentations, you have to be able to stand up and cut it. This is the Age of Distraction and Era of Fake News and we only have one shot. These days, with the micro patience of audiences we face, you don’t get any margin. If you sound boring, they will immediately lunge for their mobile and depart from you and your message. They will escape straight to the internet, to much more intriguing worlds like their email, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.

AI is only a problem if you are a crap presenter. For the rest of us, let’s give AI powered presenters a sound public thrashing and blow them out of the water.