AI-Generated Slides: Are They Good? Can Students Tell?

TL;DR

This study evaluates the quality and perception of AI-generated slides in education, finding that students view AI and human slides similarly and that coding tools produce the most accurate and pedagogically sound slides.

Contribution

It provides an empirical assessment of AI-generated slides' quality and student perception, highlighting their potential in instructional design.

Findings

Coding assistants produce the most accurate and pedagogically sound slides.

Students rate AI-generated slides similarly to instructor-created slides.

Students cannot reliably distinguish between AI-generated and human-created slides.

Abstract

As generative AI (GenAI) tools become easily accessible, there is promise in using such tools to support instructors. To that end, this paper examines using GenAI to help generate slides from instructor authored course notes, emphasizing instructor and student perceptions. We examine an end-to-end education tool (NotebookLM), two general-purpose LLMs (Claude, M365 Copilot), and two coding assistants (Cursor, Claude Code). We first analyze whether GenAI generated slides are ``good'' via narrative assessment by educators. We choose the best slides to use (with some modification) in a real course setting, and compare the student perception of human vs. AI generated slides. We find that coding assistant tools produce slides that were most accurate, complete, and pedagogically sound. Additionally, students rate GenAI slides to be of similar quality as instructor-created slides, and cannot reliably identify which slides are AI-generated. Additionally, we find a negative correlation between a high quality rating and a high ``AI-generated'' rating, suggesting students associate poor quality with the source of the slides being AI. These findings highlight promising opportunities for integrating GenAI into instructional design workflows and call for further research on how educators can best harness such tools responsibly and effectively.