I asked GPT-3 to make a presentation for me

I told GPT-3 I would be presenting at a Hacker News meetup in Japan, and asked it to generate a presentation for me. Here's what it came up with, read by yours truly.

There's also a tweet-sized version here, and the slides are also on SlideShare here.

Details

I used the OpenAI API to generate one slide and one image caption at a time, asking GPT-3 about three times for each and picking the best output. When it generated image caption, I would go online to find a matching image, or if none was available I'd try to splice up an image using Photopea and Remove.bg.

My starting prompt was:

A presentation was given at the Hacker News event in Kansai. 
The title of the presentation was

When it generated bullet points, I let it generate several and then picked the best 5 out of what it came up with. Once it generated a slide, I edited that into the prompt as well so it could continue generating more slides for the same presentation, and re-ran it to generate the next slide.

Piecewise concatenated output from OpenAI:

"Strategies for Learning to Code in Japan" and the subtitle was 
"Fairly easily and rather effortlessly achieve practical software 
development skills."

The first presentation slide had a picture of a man playing a violin 
in front of a wall of violins, and the title of the slide was "Violin 
skills are of almost no value". Text under the slide said: "a metaphor 
for how useful programming ability can be for starters".

The next slide suggested a number of strategies for how to best use 
ones time to achieve productivity quickly:

1. Nobody figures out how to code perfectly their first time.
2. It's mostly luck.
3. Learn just the right skills, in the right order.
4. Avoid perfectionism.
5. Not doing something is sometimes the best way to learn something.

The next slide had a picture of a monkey drawn in crayon, and
and the words "All problems are pretty much the same." written 
under the monkey drawing. The text of that slide was:
"Not only are all software development problems more or less 
the same, but the best way to solve them is usually so simple, 
that a monkey could do it."

The next slide had a picture of a monkey, a sand hourglass, 
and a spoon and the words "Let's get started then!" written 
under it.

The text of that slide was: "Just like a monkey makes sand castles 
with an hourglass, all our time is of limited duration, so let's get 
started to code a product for clients. Software development is 
actually a bunch of often complicated problems. But that's not a big 
deal, is it!?" and the color of the text was red.

The next slide had a picture of a happy architect with a blueprint 
in one hand and blue pencil in the other hand, standing in front of a 
huge complex, and the words "Looking smart is the social norm".

The text of that slide was:
"Almost all developers feel the pressure (for whatever reason) to have the
look of the competent coder, most likely due to peer pressure. So it might
be counter-productive to cut corners during the development phase." and
the color of the text was purple.

The next slide had a sign: "DANGER do not enter" and this text under it: 
"If you don't need your code to run during actual product development, 
stuff it in a module in a separate directory." The color of the text 
was orange.

The next slide just had the text: Richard Feynman was reported to have 
said: "What I cannot create, I do not understand," something that has 
been paraphrased in the programming world as "If you don't regularly turn 
code into poetry, you probably aren't a good programmer."

The next slide had a picture of a happy runner and this sentence next 
to it: "If you've written 500 lines of code and have an actual working 
program that doesn't crash, sprint to the finish line." 
and the color of text was green.

The next slide had a picture of a swordsman catching a bullet and 
this text: "A happy ending to all of our code." and the color of 
text was yellow. The text of the slide was: "So you built a program
and it worked in like 10 minutes. All your code was beautiful." 
and the color of text was blue.

The final slide had the title of the presentation: "Why you should 
always code like it's your last day on Earth". Next to it was a picture 
of a person with their whole life ahead of them staring into a terminal, 
a ball and chain attached to each leg, and a long nose and a beard. The 
text of the slide was:
"If you always think like it's the last day on Earth (your last day coding), 
it'll push you just enough to get you to finish whatever you might need 
to finish."

The last remark at the last slide of the presentation was:
"So now that you know it's impossible to not 
learn to code, go write something, anything.
So stop writing nuclear missile designs, or the best 
ad blocker ever, and just get started on whatever.

The next slide had the text "And then when you finally do finish this nice 
feature, you should always make sure you drink the required amount of alcohol." 
with a background image of whiskey bottles. The decorative text on that slide 
was: "But don't drink too much alcohol and end up like me."

And the concluding remark of the presentation:
"So basically just go ahead before you wake up in a cold sweat from a scary 
dream about the future, coding-less, uh, eating those annoying squares of tofu."
The background image of that slide was a plate of tofu next to a glass of beer
and the font color was orange to emphasize the suggestion to drink.