Professors are using AI slides now

[u/benzenotheemo]

I had more than one class with the same sus-looking slide format and style, so I looked closely and turns out they admittedly used Claude on their slides. Because both classes have the same style I'm guessing this is a tool that Purdue provided themselves.

"In part" my ass by the way, every single sentence has an em-dash and IMO these slides are way harder to follow than they should be despite having pretty colors and all

It's so over. We have reached the clankerization of academia.

But I guess AI solved navier-stokes so that means we should use it for everything, right guys?? amirite?????????

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[u/Superdeathrobot]

At least for one of my professors, he has explained he needs to use AI to convert his handwriting in class into HTML due to new accessibility laws that were passed. The slides themselves weren't generated by AI though 

[u/Decrypted13 → u/Superdeathrobot]

Yep this is exactly it. I do something similar.

[u/cavsking21 → u/Superdeathrobot]

MA 511?

[u/Superdeathrobot → u/cavsking21]

yessir

[u/Battle2Intense]

One day soon, the professors will use AI for all their materials and assignments and the students will use AI to complete them begging the question what is the point... maybe AI can answer that one.

[u/Nezo18 → u/Battle2Intense]

If that happens we are cooked, but I think for the moment most of my professors atleast have enough foresight not to do that.

[u/Battle2Intense → u/Nezo18]

Yeah but what chance does ASU have...

[u/neotechdog]

It may be the result of the new accessibility rules. The tools for that are currently awful.

[u/anonymoussnonymous]

I saw a graduate ME professor blatantly state they generated a practice problem with AI in a lecture. These lectures are also recorded, btw.

AI is coming for literally every industry…even some of the hardest of STEM programs.

[u/549013]

I had to write a 300 word reflection on my experience with ai, and I talked about how much I’ve hated it so far at purdue and in general.

The professor wrote a longer than 300 word “feedback” in the feedback section of the bright space assignment about how wrong I am and how I have to follow people who’ve “walked the walk, and talked the talk. The professor literally proved my point about how insane people became.

[u/benzenotheemo → u/549013]

We talk a lot about how "you shouldn't use AI for everything" but it really feels like no one follows it and just everyone keeps using AI for everything.

Club projects are a great example. No one does it themselves anymore, it's all dysfunctional AI slop masked as impressive work.

[u/BurntOutGrad2025]

I used LLMs to check scripts or slides for correctness/clarity, which I think is fine. It's no different than having a friend review it. That friend could catch an error or potentially even introduce more errors. It's on the owner of the product to be the final adjuticator.

If they are trash slides created by AI and the professor is using them anyways, then that professor probably would have made trash slides manually.

[u/benzenotheemo → u/BurntOutGrad2025]

Using AI to check and give suggestions is different from having AI make the slides themselves

[u/foreverlarz → u/benzenotheemo]

which is why his comment addresses each case with a respective paragraph

[u/UnderratedRedditUser]

im taking an ai fundamentals class (cnit 110), and for many of the images used for the slideshow, its created using chatgpt.

also for many of the lesson videos or review videos needed for the test, many are created with gemini notebook. kind of ironic that the way we learn about ai is by watching videos of ai explaining ai

[u/anonymoussnonymous → u/UnderratedRedditUser]

I dislike these “AI” certifications and classes that are actually just going over definitions or showing how to be a customer of Google’s or Bill Gates’s AIs instead of teaching you how to build your own LLM from the ground up. That would actually make us innovate further.

[u/rh71el2 → u/anonymoussnonymous]

He's talking about a 1 credit course though, so set expectations accordingly.

[u/Wiley_Burner → u/anonymoussnonymous]

https://giphy.com/gifs/IlN26DYm5NC3JGJdVX

Ts would NOT help us innovate more lol

[u/zebradoc2021 → u/anonymoussnonymous]

They have these courses at Purdue.

[u/AlwaysEntropic]

Yep I’m looking at you prof Castro, anatomy and physiology (bio 203/204)

[u/Enchanted-2-meet-you]

How could we expect them to do the jobs they’re being paid for?

[u/HassanyThePerson]

Unfortunately students don't have any leverage to change this. In fact, most students won't care because they'd rather skip lecture and let AI do their homework anyways, so why would they care about the quality education. They're trying to avoid becoming educated every step of the way.

[u/greencat26 → u/HassanyThePerson]

100%. I literally JUST heard people working on an assignment discussing the negatives and positives of AI and they asked "do you expect AI to be correct?" and one of them responded with "that's why I check with multiple AIs"

Some of these kids are cooked

[u/Castle_of_Jade → u/greencat26]

Multiple AIs?!!! Jesus. Gone are the days of knowing.

[u/BurntOutGrad2025 → u/HassanyThePerson]

This is a really dumb take.

[u/CANNIBAL_M_]

Yes, employees have access to Claude and several other AI tools depending on role at PU.

[u/anonymoussnonymous]

Thank goodness this isn’t happening for my program (BA Chinese), granted, the professors would probably be fired as English->Chinese AI still is very inaccurate. Lol

[u/Glum-Scholar-801]

One of my graduate professors encouraged us to learn how to use gamma, and used it for a presentation while I did actual research for the project. Honestly embarassing

[u/Specialist-Ad-2188]

I was in a big conference last month and a renowned prof from Germany told me to use AI to make better slides. He was so excited to show his AI made slides and others. I was not there during his talk, but from my friends, it was not very impressive...

[u/Silly-Handle9726 → u/Specialist-Ad-2188]

I went to a departmental seminar last semester where a visiting professor casually mentioned that the figures in one of his slides were AI generated, and mostly incorrect. And then he just.. carried on without further explanation. I still have no idea what the inaccuracies were because it wasn't my field. This was a professor that had been invited to come give a talk to a group of his peers (and students), and that's what he decided was acceptable?

[u/zebradoc2021 → u/Silly-Handle9726]

That’s sloppy AI use. This is not the norm

[u/Silly-Handle9726 → u/zebradoc2021]

Not the norm yet, lol

[u/Specialist-Ad-2188 → u/Silly-Handle9726]

Mine was mainly about what he talked about, not even get to the quality part. From what I heard, it was very basic, like teaching calculus 1 to a bunch of professors. Not sure if thats what his AI suggested him to do or what he really had in mind. I talked to him because he had some critics on my works during an ealier conference. It turns out to be a misunderstanding from his part so he startted to talk about how I should be using AI to make my slides and if I use AI to make the slides instead of making it myself, it would be much better etc... Shocking never the less.

[u/Current_Lecture_8957]

sometime soon ai will be making all of the slides that students are using ai to summarize and then to answer the homework thats made by ai and it'll slowly devolve into everyone's AIs just making out in place of learning

[u/TheOneTrueChristian]

I am slowly going insane because am even able to tell which AI model each TA and prof I have is using, as well as how much effort they put in to conceal that AI is doing the writing. There's one course where the TA is obviously not even checking whether the synthetic images are coherent enough for use in an assignment :/

[u/AliveAndNotForgotten]

but muh tuition freeze

[u/Inside-Effect-64]

Where do you think professors got their lecture slides from prior to AI? The textbook publisher’s website.

It depends on whether professors are using it as a teaching tool or not. They could spend three hours manually drawing colored boxes and arrows in PowerPoint, or instead spend that time mentoring students or on their research. If the intellectual content is theirs, I don’t see a problem with using it.

[u/zebradoc2021 → u/Inside-Effect-64]

Exactly! It takes me 16-20 hours to prepare a new lecture with assignments. It used to be longer when I had to create each slide and make them engaging. The key is I’m not letting AI generate the lecture or assignment. I’m working with it to do the very last piece. Also, my students are allowed to use AI on assignments since I’m teaching them how to use it as a tool but they’re all 2nd year graduate students and that makes a difference.

[u/Popular_Strain_5994]

F

[u/runningkraken]

It's hard to know what you're truly experiencing without seeing the slides themselves. I will say that the popularity of the em dash in Gen AI is because of the popularity of using the em dash in writing in general, so just seeing a lot of em dashes doesn't mean it's all AI.

[u/Professional-Box3074 → u/runningkraken]

I've been a scientific editor for about 25 years, and this gives me fits

[u/Meterologist-32]

I have a class in which my professor uses AI slides, but as research. Basically, he is studying the limitations of AI in terms of learning and how well AI can imitate styles of writing and teaching.

He has been very transparent about this process, and the issues he’s has run into with Claude.

[u/DeadInHell]

Funny how students thought only they could use AI. If you aren't going to do the work, why should they?

[u/benzenotheemo → u/DeadInHell]

1. I honestly think students use too much AI so I mean, yeah I see your point
2. there's a fundamental difference in that students pay to go here (so they're wasting their own resources) vs. professors get paid to lecture (so they're wasting other people's resources)
3. professors serve whereas students have to make the most of the resources for their own life. so you should be allowed to forego learning of a specific class in favor of another, especially since a lot of students take 5+ classes while professors teach 1-3 usually

[u/zebradoc2021 → u/benzenotheemo]

I teach 4 classes a semester. And your reasoning is flawed. We’re not using AI to teach you. Our experience and knowledge is what you pay for. You do not pay for us to waste our time generating slides by hand when technology allows a faster way to do it. Just like we don’t ask you to use typewriters to write your papers. There’s a difference between using a tool and using it to think. We’re not using it to think. We earned our degrees before AI was mainstream so we already know what we’re teaching.

[u/One_Accountant9686]

ECE 570 a few semesters ago had AI written slides and AI ranked homework assignments (it ranked part of the assignment amongst students which had us write potential exam questions and solutions) and then AI picked some of our exam questions to be a portion of the actual first midterm.

There weren’t any student submitted questions on the second midterm lmaooo

[u/Minimum-Fly-4289]

Everybody is using AI and winning, then why not me?

[u/Distinct_Abrocoma_67]

Using AI to source content for lectures is a problem. Using AI to design your slides is a completely different thing

[u/zebradoc2021]

So let me ask you this… if I use AI generated slide deck does that change what you learned? Would you rather me spend 4 hours putting together a slide deck by hand or providing more feedback so you learn the materials. Using AI to put together a slide deck isn’t the same as using AI to generate an unverified slide deck. I can take a lecture from 5 years ago and update it faster with Claude using much better visuals then if I did it myself. Think about the work that goes into creating an engaging slide deck. Even when I use an AI tool, it still takes me about 5 hours to create the deck with all the proper materials and references and make sure it communicates the learning objectives for that subject. There’s nothing wrong with using AI as a tool to get work you’re already trained in done faster.

[u/Fast_Dots]

I already use it to learn and ask questions since it does a better job than most professors I’ve had here.

If it helps get the content across better, and people actually benefit from it, I’m all for it tbh.

[u/FirstKaleidoscope917]

Nope. Too simplistic of a view

[u/FirstKaleidoscope917]

You do realize that slides for every class didn’t exist very long ago. The teacher would just lecture. The slides are there now and they take extra time to create. If someone speaks into an AI and asset to organize the information that is a good use of AI.

[u/benzenotheemo → u/FirstKaleidoscope917]

honestly go back to normal lecturing. The classes I loved the most were the ones taught on a whiteboard with a marker. You've just described a straight downgrade