I’m excited to be speaking on Tuesday 23 June at 4pm during the Audiobook Empire Narrator Summit! I’m passionate about my topic From Arthurian Legends to WhodunIts: Creating Your Publishing Empire With Public Domain Books. I hope you’ll be able to join us, especially since we’ll include a Q&A in the session.

You may be thinking, “That’s great, but what does your presentation have to do with AI?”

This article will answer that question.

Background

When I worked for the IRS, I read Cliff Atkinson’s book Beyond Bullet Points, and it changed how I develop presentation slides,

Atkinson instructs you to create a storyboard of your discussion points. Using his process, you’re able to scale your presentation to last from 15 to 45 minutes. You can download his invaluable templates on his site

Due to this system, I don’t make ugly, boring slides consisting of black text bullet points on a white background. Instead, each slide displays a captivating image that has something to do with the idea I will address.

As you might expect, it can take some time to locate images that correlate to your talking points. I can spend weeks creating slides for a presentation.

I often have to pay to license the graphics on my slides. I use Public Domain (PD) images whenever possible, but modern concepts usually call for modern images.

AI Advances

Whether or not we want AI attributes in our software, manufacturers are shoving AI down our throats in all of our applications — often without the capability for the user to opt-out of the AI tools.

We’re increasingly bombarded with overly enthusiastic messages like:

• “Everybody is using AI. You better get on board, or you’ll be left behind!”
• “The AI can create what you need in seconds!”
• “Think of how much time you’ll save!”

In fact, the TV show HACKS included just such a conversation in this week’s episode. I was glad to hear Ava’s character speak about the lack of ethics in AI tools. Most Large Language Models (LLMs) have been trained using copyrighted texts and art without permission from or compensation to the creators. Also, the tremendous power consumption required by the data centers is doing terrible things to the people in their communities and the planet.

Meanwhile, many people have embraced AI as part of their everyday life, seemingly without regard to any privacy concerns. One of our friends told me she asks ChatGPT numerous questions every day. She said it saves her time doing research. She does investigate the options the Chatbot presents her, but I suspect most people don’t.

Other people I know create every new fad meme made with generative AI just because they saw it on social media. They either don’t know or couldn’t care less about the lack of ethics and power consumption used for their little bit of fun.

Ryan Holiday discusses in his 5/7/26 newsletter how AI is destroying our critical thinking skills. By writing our thoughts, we are “focused, patient, and disciplined.” We become different people as we learn how WE think rather than blindly accepting AI suggestions or asking a chatbot to write something for us..

My Initial Forays Into AI

I will say that I have used the AI tools in Evernote and Adobe Acrobat. In both cases, my usage is akin to a semantic search of my material contained in the application.

In Evernote, I often ask the AI Assistant to find an entry among my 20K+ notes that contains a certain quote or describes a situation. I also heavily rely on its transcription tool on newspaper articles, recordings, and even my journals because it recognizes handwriting. The linked article outlines the many corrections I must make to the transcriptions and includes info about Evernote’s data privacy policy.

With Adobe Acrobat, I have interrogated its AI Assistant about the PDF of a Public Domain audiobook as part of my prep for an audiobook I was about to record. (I’d need to fully read the Privacy Policy and related FAQs before I asked the AI Assistant anything about a copyrighted PDF.) I’ve asked it for:

• analysis of media influences in a court case
• character descriptions, accents, and pages where they have dialogue
• page numbers where the author referred to himself in first person
• pronunciation list of proper names
  • In one case, I asked it how it knew that the name should be pronounced the way it suggested and not the other way that name is commonly said. The bot supplied its reasons. I did some research to find a family member and confirmed the pronunciation with them. Adobe’s AI Assistant got it right.

Here’s where my current AI dilemma comes into play.

Experiment

In my June presentation, I’ll teach narrators about using the wealth of Public Domain works, which is material on which the copyright has elapsed. Things in the PD belong to ALL of us. If the corporate overlords who built the LLMs behind generative AI had trained them with PD works, I would eagerly use every AI tool available.

Some people argue that AI advances are no different than the Industrial Revolution. Technology advances inevitably put people out of jobs.

AI is different, though, because of its origins in stolen copyrighted work. I can’t ignore that aspect.

I have to confess, though, that my strong desire to save weeks of time, possibly generating the whole series of slides with a few keystrokes, tempted me to see what AI actually could do for me.

I have a subscription to Microsoft Office 365, which excitedly assures me that its Copilot could:

Generate and edit images, posters, infographics, banners, and more: Turn ideas into pro-grade visuals in minutes. Just describe what you want to create—AI handles the heavy lifting so you can focus on the message, not the mechanics. Then, make precise, targeted edits with our AI visual editor.

It first guided me to choose a template in one of these categories:

• Recommended
• Pitch Deck
• Business and Productivity
• Research Shareout
• Project Report
• Marketing

Templates have been a mainstay of Office for decades. I’m a firm proponent of templates and other ways to be efficient.

However, none of the templates looked like anything I envisioned or want to use.

I started a chat in Copilot. I first asked, “How can I generate a Powerpoint presentation based on a theme without using a template?”

It responded with an in-depth series of steps to manually make a Powerpoint file, starting with a blank presentation, choosing colors and fonts, etc. In other words, I was shown the same process I’ve followed for the last 30 years.

I then asked, “I know how to manually make a presentation. I want to know how to use Copilot to generate a set of images for my slide backgrounds that all visually related to the key word I give it.”

This time, the bot gave me a much better response, saying:

Got it —you’re not asking how to design slides, you want a repeatable Copilot workflow to generate a cohesive set of background images that all “feel like the same collection,” driven by one keyword.

It offered another lengthy set of instructions and pointed to this official reference.

I wrote a very specific prompt to request an image, and the rendered graphic beautifully matched my description. Inserting it in the slide then caused Powerpoint to give me numerous design ideas about the text.

Conclusion

My experiment made me want to see whether I could develop my whole presentation this way. I haven’t decided which way to proceed: the old manual method of finding — and possibly paying for — suitable images, or the new approach of generating them. I could even choose a hybrid plan as I’ve already found some good images on stock photo site.

Hence the title of this article — An AI Dilemma.

What choice would you make if you were me? Please leave a comment!