SlideMagic Blog

Humans process information absorbed during the day in a good night’s sleep. Important things get put in long-term memory, details that are less important go to the “forget bin”. Stress and noise gets reduced. When we get up, we feel refreshed and ready to get going again.

Memory is a big issue in AI at the moment. A few months ago, it was about remembering your last 3 prompts (sentences). Today, these “context windows” can span novels, to the point where this memory actually starts to confuse the model. A technical solution: dream cycles where the AI model peruses its information, selectively forgets details, and stores important data for future reference.

When it comes to presentation design, it is important to give your thoughts rest as well. Coming back to a story line after a few days makes your realize what actually is the best way to communicate the message.

And a fresh pair of AI eyes can help as well. Clear the context of your model, or open an entirely different one, upload your draft and ask whether this is actually the best way to tell your story…

Another day, another model improvement. The latest visual model by OpenAI is now the gold standard for creating realistic image, beating Google’s Nano Banana (August 2025).

I prompted a “911 in Hoogeveen” back in an earlier post to Nano Banana (left), and the ChatGPT result today to the right. Nano Banana figured out Hoogeveen was a town in the Netherlands, and created a historical Dutch town as the backdrop, ChatGPT got the actual details of the town (which I recognize very well), but created its own mashup version of the city.

Text rendering is now great. Look at the traffic sign: correct spelling and places relevant to the town. The model is actually incredibly good at making slide in consistent on-brand format. Below the result of a request to transform a slide in a 1960s Swiss graphic design style. The catch: you get pixels not a file you can edit…

It achieves these results not by just being a better pixel generation model. The response to a prompt now involves reasoning about it, sketching a few raw options, ‘seeing’ (an LLM cannot see) the intermediary results, picking the best one, then producing the final result in pixels.

ChatGPT Images 2 is now the default model in ChatGPT, it will be used when you ask it to create an image. Set the model effort to ‘thinking’ to add more reasoning effort in the processing.

To be continued.

Another day, another presentation AI tool. Codex Computer Use is a plugin for OpenAI’s Codex desktop app. It enables control of any app on your machine using the regular human interface: ‘seeing’ screen and making clicks. (Mac only, and not available in the EU/UK because of regulatory restrictions).

Its powers are phenomenal. SlideMagic is a quirky app with a small user base. In a few minutes I got it to insert a profit and loss table, add a year to it, and then take the last year of the table and turn that into a horizontal waterfall chart.

In PowerPoint for example, this tool will be much more useful than the Claude PowerPoint plugin, which “fights” complex PPTX file formats (a huge amount of nexted XML tags) to make simple edits like moving a box. The Codex Computer Use plugin can simple drag the box.

This feature is extremely token-hungry though, probably because of the screenshot data that gets send back to the server.

I have been experimenting with OpenClaw, a 24/7 personal AI assistant. It is an open source project that was created over the past month, created almost by accident as a hobby project by a developer. Late last year, developers discovered that using an AI coding tool for non-coding applications really works, especially if you can give it access to local files (rather than chatting). Next step: keep the AI agent running 24/7. Next step, find a way to let the AI agent keep some context about you. (Context memory is a big issue in AI, it fills up at some time, so storing bits of context for future reference enables persistent awareness). Next step, implement recurring instructions. Next, make the AI assistant available from any channel, including Whatsapp. This, combined with full system access, creates an incredibly powerful AI assistant (that can also be incredibly destructive). “It’s 2AM, I have a 12 hour to do list and full shell access, lovin’ it”. What can possibly go wrong.

So it requires some technical knowledge to run this thing in a vaguely responsible way. I put it on AWS EC2 in a completely isolated virtual network, with an access tunnel that only I control, plus a number of prompt injection filters running on yet another server. (OpenClaw’s founder has joined OpenAI exactly for that reason, to get the financial resources to fix the complexity and security issues)

Working with it, enables me to get a feel for the future. Direct instructions to applications (code editors, presentation design software, spreadsheets, food takout apps) will become increasingly irrelevant.

People are starting to develop a pretty good sense of whether an image “smells like AI”. The audience will notice when you use them just as visual fillers like you used to use stock images. (“Life-style conscious gen-z person working from the local cafe”).

Completely obvious AI renderings are comparable to clip art of the earlly 2000s. Hyper realistic AI images are similar to stock images, “something is off here”.

Apply the same approach to AI images as you did to stock images.

The past decade with spend a lot of energy moving all our files into the cloud, and accessing them through a browser-based application. That is going to reverse in the era of AI.

A good old desktop folder is the perfect context for an AI agent. All information in one place. Different formats, different applications, all accessible and editable.

I started experimenting with a spreadsheet/presentation workflow that mirrors the way I write code. Pointing Claude Code at a directory with files and let it orchestrate analysis and design under my supervision.

As AI gets more and more capable and I use it for more and more things in my daily workflow, it creates a new problem: waiting for AI. Most tasks now take 1-3 minutes for which you have to wait for the result. Most takes would have taken you much much more than that if you were to do them yourself, so a big productivity gain, but, 1-3 minutes is too short to go and do something else, so you wait, get distracted, break your flow, and find yourself getting back to what you were working on 30 minutes later. “Ah small mistake, let’s do fix that. Click. 1-3 minutes wait.

I have not found a solution yet, and am experimenting:

• Running lots of agents in parallel, so it is like a plate-on-stick catching game
• Running the tasks in parallel of an activity that is easy to interrupt (watching a tutorial video)
• Writing a quick blog post…
• Etc.

A new world

This has gone under the radar screen for me. The Claude plugin for PowerPoint is available for Claude Max, Team, and Enterprise users. It links to your existing Claude account (to burn tokens) and does exactly what you expect it to do. More information here.

Recently, people start getting really concerned about autonomous AI doing its thing with your passwords and credit cards. But I think that not that much has changed since the first emergence of computers. Computers trade billions in stocks and currencies, run nuclear powerpoint plants.

The difference, these systems are carefully monitored and are predictable and well-understood. It is not about the intelligence of the software, it is about the level of control you give it. People wanting “to push the boundaries” and see how far AI can go seem to be putting a 10 year with Microsoft Flight Simulator experience at the controls of a real 747.

I have started to use AI tools heavily in my day-to-day work. Not for email and calendar management, but for coding and document production. All seems reasonably under control, things being sandboxed on my own machine. “Reasonably” What is not, is the chaotic user interface when it comes to giving permissions to things on your file system. Many of these questions will not be understood by the IT layman.

Everyone is raving about Anthropic’s Cowork tool to automate knowledge work. Many incumbent database/information providers and consultancy firm’s stock prices get hammered. The real revolution for Anthropic might be an acquisition that did not get a lot of press. In December, they acquired Bun, a software development platform. My sense is that Anthropic is developing a trusted platform that can build and run code safely on your computer without the constant flow of questions whether it is OK to install package x, y, and z. I think AI models will become a commodity, the real winner in the next generation of computing will be the player that offers this trusted platform that can keep AI in check.

I had a backlog of feature improvement for SlideMagic in the back of my mind for a long time (SlideMagic 4.0). Started working on it, but never pushed them to a final end product. I am actually glad I didn’t. The path I was going down on was a “hand-held” guidance of AI combined with a dramatically improved graphical user interface. The development of AI models have made this approach obsolete.

i am starting now to tweak and customize the recently released knowledge workflow productivity tools so they work for me. Strangely enough, my decision to build SlideMagic 2.0 as a desktop app with local file access, will come in handy now to build a tool that wraps the raw engine and makes the underlying engine accessible to the average user.

Let’s see where this goes.