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Show HN: I'm a teacher and built an AI presentation tool

260 points·by slidehero·l’année dernière·106 comments

Show HN: I'm a teacher and built an AI presentation tool

2 points·by slidehero·l’année dernière·1 comments

comments

slidehero
·il y a 2 mois·discuss
presumably most people running these bots are doing it for some financial gain. as long gain > cost the issue won't go away.

It'll stop the ones doing it for the lols, but I imagine they're a minority anyway.
slidehero
·il y a 3 mois·discuss
similar story with the appendix.

Initially considered a useless vestige, now thought to be involved with maintaining gut bacteria.
slidehero
·il y a 3 mois·discuss
>I simply see no benefit of a copy of very Windows-y app.

That's cool, sounds like it's not for you then.

There are plenty of people who would appreciate it though.

I've been using N++ for a long time. I have tried just about every editor out there and I always end up back in N++.

It's old. It is missing a lot of the bells and whistles of newer editors, but I'm still most productive in old faithful :)
slidehero
·il y a 4 mois·discuss
had the same thought.

I've been a gamer for just about 40 years. Gaming is my "thing"

I found the challenges fun, but easy. Coming back and reading comments from people struggling with the games, my first thought was - yup definitely not a gamer.

My approach was to poke at the controls to suss the rules, then the actual solutions were really straightforward.

fwiw, I'm pretty dumb generally, but these kinds of puzzles are my jam.
slidehero
·il y a 5 mois·discuss
Asimov comes across as jealous of Orwell's unmatched contribution to not only literature but also culture. Asimov never came close to having the same impact, maybe that irked him.
slidehero
·il y a 10 mois·discuss
>Do you believe the results would have been the same under a Stalin instead of a Gorbachev?

A little different if you're talking foreign invasion obviously. In Poland's case it was Poles vs Poles and regardless of the level of tyranny, soldiers have trouble shooting their countrymen if they're sitting in a factory.

If the other guy is actively shooting at you though?... The logic is simple to follow.
slidehero
·il y a 10 mois·discuss
>If they had a means to defend themselves, maybe there could have been less lives lost.

dude c'mon, be serious.

the response to "my house is on fire" is not "gee I wonder what would happen if I added more fuel..."

The response is to starve the fire of oxygen. Labour is a government's oxygen.
slidehero
·il y a 10 mois·discuss
>but having known refugees from a tyrannical government

my family escaped Poland as political refugees before the end of communism. Poland famously had bloodless revolution in 1989 exactly this way.

Down tools. stop work and the economy essentially seized up (practically over night).

>Sometimes it will work out, but not without sacrifice.

Sacrifice is always necessary.

If the factories stop, there is no way to move forward, regardless of how tyrannical the government.
slidehero
·il y a 10 mois·discuss
[flagged]
slidehero
·il y a 11 mois·discuss
> It's _derivative_ work.

fwiw, I mostly agree with you (ai training stinks of some kind of infringement), but legal precedent is not favouring copyright holders at least for now.

In Bartz v. Anthropic and Kadrey v. Meta "judges have now held that copying works to train LLMs is “transformative” under the fair use doctrine" [1]

i.e. no infrigement - bearing in mind this applies only in the US. The EU and the rest of the world are setting their own precedents.

Copyright can only be contested in the jurisdiction that the alleged infringement occurred, and so far it seems that fair use is holding up. I'm curious to watch how it all plays out.

It might end up similarly to Uber vs The World. They used their deep pockets to destabilise taxis globally and now that the law is catching up it doesn't matter any more - Uber already won.

[1] https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2025/07/a-tale-...
slidehero
·l’année dernière·discuss
>There's no reason why training on a billion images is any different

You gloss over this as if it's a given. I don't agree. I think you're doing a different thing when you're sampling billions of things equallly.
slidehero
·l’année dernière·discuss
all good :) I appreciate the discussion.
slidehero
·l’année dernière·discuss
Fair points and I appreciate the heads up. I'll add those things asap.

>If you're inviting teachers to add information about their districts and their students, you MUST take your security, your supply chain, and your disclosures seriously.

Definitely not the case with SlideHero. There is no facility to add student names or any school related information. It's purely a slide deck and activity generator.

>enter PII about minor children, and then get fired and that data will be invisible to my department forever.

That would be very poor judgement on the teacher's part for sure. There are no prompts to enter student data at all in SlideHero, it's really not designed for that.

>Please, be careful.

100% agree, I'll add a note to remind users not to add any identifying information, although they'd almost have to be willfully doing it since thats not in line with the purpose of the app.

Appreciate the concern though and you make valid points, so I appreciate it.
slidehero
·l’année dernière·discuss
>I feel there's some valid criticism in here that is unfortunately presented in maybe a little too aggressive a tone.

It's all good, I'm a school teacher so I have a thick skin :)

>OP, I think this is terrific work;

Thank you!

>I think its pretty nifty too!

:)
slidehero
·l’année dernière·discuss
>This is a great idea.

Thank you.

>I've worked as a teacher and I think people severely underestimate the amount of time teachers have to prepare lessons.

Yes absolutely. I was spending a lot of time in ChatGPT for brainstorming about a year ago and that's where the idea for SlideHero came about.

>That said, I don't think I would use it to create an entire lesson.

Agreed, the purpose of SlideHero is not to "take over" a teachers planning and lesson delivery, I've designed it to be an value add, which is why I devoted a fair amount of effort to the additional activites that come with every presentation.

>If I were still teaching, I would definitely try it out for that.

I'll take that as high praise considering you're not a huge fan of LLMs :)

>I would consider making it easier for teachers to share what they've created with each other.

Yes for sure. That viral hook is soon to come. I have ideas for a marketplace where teachers can list their presentations and make some money selling them too, but I'm getting a little carried away now ... that's for further down the line.
slidehero
·l’année dernière·discuss
>Perhaps if all the prompts were translated to a language of choice

Yes you're probably right.

>But maybe you never even considered making a multi-lingual tool

I think there is a way to produce output that is in the desired language, but I honestly haven't looked too deeply into it. For now I am going to stay focused on English though.

>How do you combine a (full time?) teaching job with building such a tool? It feels way more than some hobby project

With many late nights and coffee, lots of coffee :)

>Congrats on the release!

Thank you I appreciate the kind words.
slidehero
·l’année dernière·discuss
>but already on first glance there was a wrong image

Yeah the images are going to be mostly match, but there is a "swap" button to choose more suitable images where the ai has picked poorly.

>and some pretty ugly use of language

Was this in your native language? I'm not sure how well ChaGPT does outside of English.

>But as a starting point, I can imagine this is a huge time saver for a teacher if they want to discuss a topic spontaneously, and only have 20 minutes to prepare.

Yes absolutely! This is the goal of SlideHero.

>Even before the rise of AI I see lots of low effort lesson materials being used

At the end of the day, it is still up to the teacher to create worthwhile resources, this was true before AI and is still true today :)

Thank you for your feedback.
slidehero
·l’année dernière·discuss
>I've shared this with friends that are teaching, and they're definitely going to try it.

That is so awesome and I'm really happy to hear it - thank you!

>as we know the last 10% is 90% of the work

yes, so true :)
slidehero
·l’année dernière·discuss
Please rememeber that a slideshow is just one tiny piece of the teaching puzzle and SlideHero is not trying to be everything for everyone.

All those things you mention are good, and necessary (adjusted for audience age of course) and a good teacher will add all that value too and that can and should happen outside of SlideHero.

My goal is to reduce teacher load by just enough that teachers see the value in paying me $7/month :)
slidehero
·l’année dernière·discuss
>I'm surprised you're allowed to do that in the first place.

Not just allowed, but expected.

>I didn't have a curriculum I was mandated to follow.

Curriculum documents are not as detailed and prescriptive as you imagine. They absolutely do go into specific detail of what must be covered, but they don't specify the how, when, sequencing etc. The teacher of course has much discretion with regard to how they teach.

>Over here, the material changes yearly, too. But it's not the teachers changing it - it's the textbook authors moving some things around

Every system has its quirks I guess :)