Why AI Presentations Look Generic (and How to Get One That Doesn't)

By the Kinsy team · Published 27 July 2026

Type a topic into an AI presentation maker and you'll have a deck in under a minute. You'll also recognise it instantly: the bullet walls, the stock photo of hands pointing at a laptop, the title that names a subject without saying anything about it. This is an honest diagnosis of why AI decks look like that — and what actually fixes it, whatever tool you use.

Why do AI presentations look generic?

AI presentations look generic because most tools fill a fixed template with topic-shaped text rather than authoring an argument from your material — the result is uniform bullet boxes, keyword-matched stock imagery, titles that name a subject instead of making a point, and the same few layouts on rotation. The deck reads as a set of filled boxes because that is, quite literally, how it was made.

The standard generation chain across the category runs: topic in, outline of headings out, each heading expanded into four to six bullets, everything poured into a pre-built layout. Every step of that chain is tuned to produce something plausible for anyone who might have typed that topic — which is exactly what makes the output feel written for no one. Averageness isn't a glitch in these systems; it's the target they aim at.

It's worth being clear that this is not a styling problem. Swap the theme on a filled template and you get the same deck in a different colour. Genericness lives in the structure — what the slides claim, in what order, on what evidence — and that's the level where it has to be fixed.

Six tells of a template-filled deck

1. Filled boxes, not an authored narrative

An authored deck starts from a claim and shapes slides around it; a filled deck starts from slide frames and pours text in. You can feel the difference in thirty seconds: in an authored deck, each slide exists because the argument needed it. In a filled one, each slide exists because the template had a box there.

2. The wall of bullets

The default slide is five to seven bullets of roughly equal length and exactly equal weight. Nothing is subordinated, nothing emphasised, and no bullet knows about the one before it. It's the visual signature of text that was split, not composed.

3. Stock imagery with no relationship to the argument

The handshake. The lightbulb. The meeting room in soft focus. The image was chosen by keyword match against the slide's topic, so it decorates the subject without supporting any claim. A quick test: if the image could be swapped onto any other slide without anyone noticing, it isn't doing anything.

4. Topic titles instead of headlines

"Market Overview". "Our Approach". "Next Steps". Titles like these name a subject but assert nothing, so a deck of them reads like a table of contents delivered slowly. Consultancies have drilled the alternative into analysts for decades: the title states the takeaway, and the slide beneath it carries the proof.

5. The same five layouts, recycled

Title-plus-bullets, two columns, three icon cards, a big number, a quote. There is nothing wrong with any of them — simple layouts are usually the right call — but cycled mechanically, without regard to what each slide is trying to prove, they announce the template. And audiences pattern-match faster than the tools assume.

6. No point of view

The most generic thing about a generic deck isn't visual at all: it never risks a claim. It surveys, balances and summarises, and it would rather be complete than be right. A deck a person actually authored has an opinion about what matters — that opinion is what makes it feel written.

What actually fixes it — in any tool

Start from your material, not a topic

A one-line topic gives a generator nothing but the internet's average of that topic to work with, so the output can only be an average too. Feed it your material instead — the strategy memo, the meeting notes, the spreadsheet, the half-finished report. Specific inputs are the single biggest lever there is: a deck built from your numbers and your framings can't help sounding like you.

Demand action titles

Rewrite every topic title as the sentence you would say out loud if that slide were the only one you got: "Churn is concentrated in month two", not "Churn analysis". Read title to title, the deck should make the whole argument on its own. We've written a full guide to action titles with before-and-after examples.

Fewer, denser points

Three points that carry evidence beat seven trimmed sentences every time. Merge bullets that are really one point, push supporting detail into the speaker notes, and let one strong number sit where four weak lines were. Density isn't more text — it's more meaning per element.

Imagery that carries meaning

Replace decoration with evidence: the chart, the product screenshot, the diagram of how the thing actually works, the photograph of the real site. The swap test from the diagnosis applies in reverse — if moving an image to another slide would break that slide's argument, it has earned its place.

The de-generic pass

Twenty minutes on any generated deck, in this order. It works in whatever editor the deck ends up in.

1. Read the titles alone. Click through the deck reading nothing but titles. If they read like a contents page, the deck has no argument yet — this pass is where you give it one.
2. Rewrite every title as an assertion. One full sentence, one claim per slide. A slide whose title you cannot turn into a claim was padding; cut it.
3. Halve the bullets. Merge duplicates, subordinate detail, and move the words you were going to say anyway into the speaker notes where they belong.
4. Audit every image. Ask what claim it supports. If there's no answer, delete it — or replace it with evidence: a chart, a screenshot, a diagram.
5. Break one layout. Take your strongest slide and let the evidence lead: one assertion title, one exhibit, one line of support. That single slide resets how the whole deck reads.
6. Add the point of view. One slide that says what you would do and why. It's the slide no generator could have written without you — which is exactly the point.

What Kinsy does about this — and what it can't

We build Kinsy, so read this section as the makers talking, and hold us to the same tests as everything above.

Kinsy plans the narrative before it builds a single slide: the deck is structured as an argument first and laid out second, which is the structural half of the fix done for you. Where a topic needs facts, it runs live research with numbered citations and fact-checks its own claims, so slides carry specifics rather than safe generalities. It writes speaker notes on every slide — which is what lets the slides themselves stay sparse — and instead of hundreds of near-identical templates it selects from five curated themes based on what your content actually is: a deliberate trade of variety for intent.

None of that makes genericness a solved problem. It's a spectrum, and every AI tool — ours included — has to fight for the specific end of it on every deck. Hand Kinsy a bare one-line topic and you'll get a more disciplined average, but still an average; hand it your material and the difference is immediate. The inputs rule has no exemption for us.

The other half of our pitch is simply that whatever the deck says, the file behaves: the preview you approve is the .pptx you download, and every text element in it opens as a real, editable object — the full story is in why AI deck tools break on PowerPoint export. Which means you can run the de-generic pass in PowerPoint itself, on real text boxes, not on pictures of them.

Keep reading

• How to write speaker notes that carry the words your slides shouldn't
• How many slides for a 10-minute presentation
• AI presentation makers that export truly editable PowerPoint files