Picture two decks built in the same tool, from the same topic, in the same amount of time. One starts from a blank topic field and comes out generic and forgettable. The other starts from a messy page of your own notes, and it’s the exact move u/SARTHAK_GUPTA_1 tested over on r/PromptEngineering. That second deck comes out sounding like you actually know the subject, and it flips the usual advice on prompting on its head.
📝 Quick Start
Here’s what you’ll walk away with:
- Why “type a topic” produces generic slides almost every time
- The workflow this Redditor now runs instead: notes first, structure second
- The exact steps to copy it for your next deck, plus where people usually skip a step
The Real Lever Isn’t The Prompt
This contributor tried a lot of angles to get a decent deck out of an AI presentation generator. Different phrasing. Different instructions. Different tricks to coax a better structure out of the tool. None of it moved the needle as much as one simple swap: feeding the tool raw notes instead of a topic.
Ask the tool for a topic, and it invents content to fill the gaps. It has to. There’s nothing else to work from, so it reaches for whatever sounds plausible for that subject. Ask it to organize your own notes instead, and it has nothing left to invent, because the material is already sitting there.
That’s the whole difference, and it beats every prompt-wording trick this author tested. No clever instruction fixes a tool that’s guessing. Only real input does.
Old Way vs New Way
The old way looks like this: type “AI in healthcare” into the box and hit generate. You get a deck full of confident-sounding claims that are only loosely true. It reads fine at a glance. It falls apart the moment someone in the room asks a follow-up question, because none of it actually came from you.
The new way flips the order. You write down what you actually know first, in whatever shape it comes out in. Then you hand that to the tool and ask it to organize it.
- Old way: topic in, generic content out, invented details throughout
- New way: your notes in, organized structure out, content you can actually defend
In the original poster’s words: “These tools are far better as organizers of your knowledge than as sources of it.” Most bad output happens because we ask them to be the source instead of the organizer. Once you see that distinction, every generic deck you’ve ever gotten from one of these tools makes a lot more sense.
Practical Steps
Here’s the workflow, step by step.
- Brain dump everything you actually know about the topic into a plain document first. Don’t worry about structure, formatting, or flow yet. Messy is fine here, this is raw material, not a draft.
- Hand that document to the generator instead of a topic. The original poster uses Gamma for the structuring pass, though the same logic applies to any AI deck tool that takes a document as input.
- Ask the tool to structure the material you gave it, not to generate from scratch. Be explicit about it: “organize this into a presentation” beats “make me a presentation about X” every time.
- Review what comes back, and edit anything the tool smoothed over or quietly invented anyway. Your notes set the ceiling, and your review sets the floor.
Watch out for one thing here. If your notes are too thin, the tool still fills gaps on its own, quietly, and you’re back to the old problem. The fix isn’t a better prompt, it’s a fuller dump.
One tip worth stealing from this Reddit user: keep a running notes document for any topic you present on often. Next time you need a deck, you skip straight to step two.
This isn’t only a slides trick. The same “dump first, structure second” order works for other AI tasks:
- ✅ Blog outlines and reports
- ✅ Client proposals
- ✅ Any AI writing task where a blank prompt tempts the model to guess
I tried a version of this on a quick outline of my own, and the difference showed up within minutes. When a model has nothing real to work from, it fills the silence with plausible-sounding nothing. Give it your own material instead, and it finally has something true to organize.
Next time you open an AI presentation generator, skip the topic field entirely. Open a blank doc, dump what you know, and hand that over instead. Check out the original discussion on r/PromptEngineering for more of this creator’s testing notes.
[Technique] Feeding an AI presentation generator my own raw notes beats every topic prompt. I tried
by u/SARTHAK_GUPTA_1 in PromptEngineering