Raise your hand if you've done this before. Opened up ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and said make me a slide deck for my client presentation. It made something. It was meh. Is this supposed to be artificial intelligence?

So last week I started working on slides for an AI Foundations class I'm giving in a few weeks. I don't have a slide deck for Cinz.AI and needed to create one.

Come along as I show you exactly how to put together a slide deck you can reuse that your AI will actually understand.

Ever done one of those fill-in-the-blank Mad Libs? I loved those growing up. You hand over a few nouns and end up with a story that's actually funny.

Now flip it. Tell someone to write a funny story from scratch, and you don’t get anything brilliant (usually). The difference is that in a Mad Lib, someone already drew the blanks and wrote the story around them. All you do is fill them.

That's exactly how to think about making slides with AI.

AI is the person handing over nouns. It's great at that. It has a harder time at drawing the blanks.

So what are the blanks?

Two files. That's it.

The first is your slide template. Not a finished deck, a set of empty shapes. A title slide, a section break, a three point slide, a quote. Each one with the headline in the right spot, in your font, in your colors. This is where the blanks go.

The second is a one page document I call the Deck Blanks. It's the part the template can't hold: who you're talking to, how you sound, which slide to use when, what you never want on a slide. This is what kind of story we're telling.

Neither one works alone. Give AI the template by itself and you get your fonts wrapped around writing that sounds like a stranger. Give it the document by itself and you get your voice on a slide that looks like every other slide on the internet. Purple gradient everywhere.

Give it both and it stops guessing. It picks the section break because your page told it to break every fourth slide. It writes a six-word headline because the slide says six words. It reaches for teal because that's the only accent it has.

You build these once. Every deck after that, you fill them..

Yes, backwards. I also load the dishwasher wrong according to someone in my house 😆 so this tracks.

This is the step everyone skips. Open Claude or ChatGPT and paste this:

Mine came back with a title slide, a section divider, a three-point slide, a prompt slide, an exercise slide, a big number, a quote, and a closing. That is the deck I keep rebuilding by hand every single time.

Not "make me a presentation." You are asking for empty shapes, not a deck. Here is what I gave Canva, close to word for word:

Swap in your own colors, fonts and slide list. The last paragraph is the part that does the heavy lifting, so keep it.

The three rules that made the difference: placeholder text only, one idea per slide, and naming what I did not want. Telling it no gradients and no icon grids is how you avoid the look that screams a robot made this.

I have Canva Pro, but you do not need it. The free plan gives you a monthly AI allowance, around 20 uses, which covers generating this a couple of times. You cannot re-roll endlessly. Generate, pick, move on.

One note on expectations. My first export came out portrait instead of widescreen, and my fonts got swapped. Both were one-click fixes. It will not come out perfect and that is fine. You are building a container, not a finished deck.

Export from Canva, open it in Google Slides or PowerPoint, and put your rules in the speaker notes of each slide. Six word headline. Three points max. Teal on numbers only.

Then hand the file back to AI and ask for one slide at a time. It can see the shape. It can see the rules. All it has to do is supply the words.

Nothing is wrong with them. I picked this route because I needed a file I could keep editing in Google Slides, carrying my real logo and my copper gradient. Whatever tool you already live in is the right one. The order is what matters: shapes, then look, then words.

👉 Want the full build? I put every step in Notion: what to do if you already have a company deck, the ratio and font fixes, the dead end I hit in Google Slides and the ten minute workaround, my slide rule set, and my template you can copy.

😬 The doom headlines were everywhere. The actual report was not.The CEO of Anthropic said the industry needs to slow down, warning Saturday that a swarm of AI agents could take over the internet within six months to a year unless companies spend more time on safeguards. That came days after two former Anthropic safety researchers went public with their concerns, and one researcher resigned over whether anyone in the industry is acting responsibly. One of them put the odds of AI causing human extinction in the next decade at 10 percent.

That is the part that traveled. Here is the part that did not.

The 2026 International AI Safety Report, written with more than 100 independent experts, says current systems show early signs of some of the relevant capabilities, but nowhere near the level that would allow a loss of control. It calls the likelihood and timing of that risk "unusually ambiguous."

Translation: the people building this are arguing about it out loud, which is new and probably healthy. And the largest group of independent experts looked at the same question and said we do not know yet.

What it means for you: nothing about your Wednesday changes. Let’s be real, many things could end the world. Focus on learning rather than fearing.→ Read it here

🇨🇦 Canada is about to hand out free AI training. On September 9 the federal government announced a $13 million partnership with the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute to train up to one million post-secondary students and more than 50,000 K to 12 educators, free. Starting September 21, colleges and universities can join the consortium and offer students a free three-hour AI literacy course. A bilingual version lands September 29. A stream for everyone else launches later this year through community partners.

What it means for you: if you are in school or teaching, ask whether your institution has joined. If you are neither, watch ailiteracyforall.ca. → Read it here

📱 The new Siri landed, and most people can't use it yet My Siri has a hard time understanding me sometimes, so I was excited about this one. iOS 27 shipped Monday, September 14. The headline feature is Siri AI, which can pull from your own messages, email and photos, read what's on your screen, and take actions inside apps. Ask it to find something in an old email, turn it into a Reminders list.

It is in beta, in English only, with French arriving in October. It is not available in the EU or China at launch. And it needs an iPhone 15 Pro or newer.→ Read it here

Here is the part I almost left out.

When I tried to set up my template properly, Google Slides would not let me. Canva exports designs, not layouts, so the screen I needed was empty. I sat there for a while assuming I had done something wrong.

I had not. I was just in the wrong room. The rules ended up in the speaker notes instead, which took ten minutes and works exactly as well.

That is most of learning AI. The thing breaks, you assume you are the problem, and the fix is somewhere ordinary.

Sabrina Ramonov has a line I keep coming back to: great decks are not visually loud, they are intellectually loud. The blanks are how you get there.

Hit reply and tell me how you use AI for your slides and design. Forever learner over here.

Cinz.AI

Your unfair advantage, one week at a time.

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