Tag: Slide Presentation

NEWLY UPDATED WITH VIDEO! Your Metaverse Is Too Small: My Keynote Presentation to the 2026 Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) Conference

Marie Vans (left) introduces me (right) as a keynote speaker at the 19th annual Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference, held in the pioneering virtual world of Second Life (screen capture from the video at the end of this blog post)

NOTE ON MY GENERATIVE AI USAGE: While most of the writing of this blogpost is me, Ryan Schultz, unassisted by GenAI tools, I should note that, in the attached PowerPoint presentation, I did make extensive use of Google NotebookLM by feeding my entire blog into a notebook, and asking it questions (as described in a blogpost here). I used many of the answers I received back in creating both the slides and the speaking notes attached to the slides, in parts two and three of my presentation. That includes the quoted speaker notes below the pictures of specific slides in this blog post!

Part one of my talk, the quotes from Andy Fidel’s keynote speech at last November’s IMMERSIVE X, which inspired me to create and give my presentation last Friday, were taken from a copy of Andy’s speaking notes which she very kindly shared with me, as her TED-style virtual talk on the ENGAGE social VR platform was not posted to YouTube by her request. Thank you, Andy!

UPDATE March 30th, 2026: you can scroll to the very bottom of this long blogpost to see the video of my presentation. Thanks again to the organizers for throwing such a successful virtual conference!

As some of you might know, a while back I was asked by my librarian colleague (and fellow Second Life aficianado) Marie Vans if I would be willing to be one of the three keynote speakers during the 2026 Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) Conference, which is held every year in the pioneering virtual world of Second Life. I said yes (of course!). I never turn down an opportunity to give a presentation in my beloved Second Life. (I was asked to speak at the 2021 Virtual Ability Mental Health Symposium, giving a presentation on the topic of this blogpost on acedia during the pandemic, and in 2024, I gave a presentation on virtual world building in Second Life, in Second Life, to a graduate class in virtual world building and design, which was team-taught by a computer science professor and an interior design professor.) So, as you can see, this was not my first rodeo. 😉

The title of my presentation, which I gave as the keynote speech of the conference on its second day, Friday, March 20th, was Your Metaverse Is Too Small: How the Biases and Preconceptions of Virtual Worlds Hinder Their Use in Education. I was inspired by a keynote address at last November’s IMMERSIVE X conference by Andy Fidel, who titled her talk, held on the ENGAGE social VR platform: The State of the Metaverse in 2026. My talk therefore consisted of three parts as follows:

  • Quotes from Andy Fidel’s talk which I found inspiring and wanted to share (7 slides);
  • My initial, general observations about the metaverse (4 slides); and finally
  • A section titled Your Metaverse Is Too Small, where I discuss various ways our biases and preconceptions about virtual worlds and social VR/AR actually hinder their effective use in educational settings (with reference to Andy’s comments; 14 slides).

Yes, it’s a lot to cover in 45 minutes, but I did it! I’m just going to share my slides as-is, without any Creative Commons-type license this time around, since a lot of it is referring back to Andy Fidel’s ideas, which I found so inspirational in the first place. And yes, while the topics of these 14 slides in part 3 all sprang out of one particularly fevered brain dump of my ideas one evening, rather than relying on GenAI, I do freely admit that I fed my entire blog into a Google NotebookLM and asked it questions in order to create the content based on thirteen (yes, 13!) different ways that, quote: “your metaverse is too small!”

Your metaverse is too small because…

  • it has too steep a learning curve for new users
  • your platform has a poor fit-to-purpose
  • it lacks accessibility features (e.g. speech-to-text for the Deaf/HoH community)
  • it is poorly designed and/or Quality Assurance tested, and it causes VR sickness/nausea (more common among women than men)
  • it is soulless/designed by committee (hello Meta Horizon Worlds and Workrooms! Proof positive that you cannot will metaverse platforms into existence by executive fiat and the spending of billions of dollars.)
  • it requires a VR/AR/XR headset (I used two slides to discuss this controversial take; see below for more detail)
  • it relies on cryptocurrencies, NFTs, or some other form of blockchain (do I really have to explain this at this point?)
  • it has poor (or non-existent) safety and trust features and policies
  • it focuses on the product rather than the community
  • it has user data privacy issues/is based on surveillance capitalism (once again, hello Meta Horizon Worlds and Workrooms!)
  • you fail to market it properly (or, in many cases, fail to market it at all)
  • it is unfriendly to different cultures and subcultures (e.g. trans people, furries, etc.)
  • (another controversial one, explained further below) it refuses adult content

Now, before all you social VR adherents rise up with torches and pitchforks and tar and feather me for even daring to say “your metaverse is too small because it requires users to have a VR/AR/XR headset,” here are the two slides, plus speaker notes:

Your metaverse is too small because it requires you to use a virtual reality headset.

It is not a surprise that many of the most popular social VR platforms (e.g. Rec Room, VRChat) also allow for non-VR users to participate. The VR headset market still has not taken off. Even the best-selling Meta Quest line of wireless virtual reality headsets (which make up an estimated 70% of the global VR headset market) has sold only approximately 30 million units around the world, and many of those devices land up collecting dust after the initial novelty of the product wears off. Apple’s Vision Pro, launched to enormous fanfare, does not publish sales figures, but industry reporters said that the company shipped approximately 390,000 units in 2024 and approximately 90,000 units in 2025. VR hardware remains bulky, heavy, and uncomfortable for extended wear. Nausea continues to affect a significant proportion of users. A VR headset isolates the wearer from their physical surroundings and from the facial expressions of the people around them—an anti-social device, in practice, even when its purpose is socialization via social VR.

The PC-tethered VR headset market—the high-end, high-fidelity segment that many early social VR platforms had built toward—proved especially stagnant. The dream of millions of consumers owning gaming-grade PCs with tethered Oculus Rift or HTC Vive headsets never materialized. Even the shift to standalone headsets like the Meta Quest series failed to generate the consumer mass-market that had been anticipated. Sansar is perhaps the most instructive case study in the danger of building a platform around assumed headset adoption. Developed by Linden Lab—the company behind Second Life—Sansar was announced in 2014 and launched in beta in 2017, timed almost precisely to coincide with what seemed like the dawning of the VR era following Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus. But the bet on tethered PCVR headsets never paid off. In March 2020, Linden Lab sold Sansar to a little-known startup called Wookey and pivoted to focus on live music events and virtual concerts, attempting to find a more sustainable niche. That hasn’t worked, either. Sansar still exists, but it is only being kept alive by volunteers at this point.

Research on technology adoption consistently shows that devices requiring behavioral change—for example, for VR, wearing something on your face, isolating yourself from physical surroundings—face much higher adoption friction than technologies that integrate into existing habits. The iPhone and Android phones succeeded partly because they fit into already-established phone-carrying behavior. VR headsets require building a new behavior from scratch.

The failure of the last metaverse hype cycle does not mean that immersive technology has no future. What failed was the specific prediction that millions of people would soon be spending significant time in virtual worlds accessed primarily through VR headsets; that this would create platform-scale opportunities comparable to social media or mobile devices.

Don’t hate me for speaking facts. No VR/AR headset (even the Meta Quest line of headsets) has taken off in the way that iPhones/Android phones and tablets and smartwatches have. In particular, the developers of those platforms who bet the farm on widespread adoption of high-end tethered PCVR headsets (hello, Sansar and High Fidelity!) lost that bet badly; Sansar is essentially moribund, and High Fidelity is now closed (although it does live on in its successor social VR platforms Vircadia and Overte, which were based on HiFi’s open-source codebase, but are also not heavily used). This failure is one of the reasons why Second Life is still going strong (or strong enough) to endure and still be profitable for Linden Lab, for over 22 years now.

And speaking of SL…

I want to make one thing very clear: in some educational applications of the metaverse (especially those intended for children and teenagers, i.e. K-12 education), a ban on adult content is absolutely necessary.

However. As my speaker notes for this last slide in my presentation state:

However, in any institution of higher learning (e.g. a university). you will find faculty, staff, and students teaching about, learning about, and doing research on topics which may include controversial or adult topics. I have argued that one of the most significant strategic errors a metaverse platform can make is the outright refusal to host adult content (or do some other sort of heavy-handed sanitization of adult content, like imposing baked-on underwear on the base male and female adult avatars).

In my blog, I’ve pointed out that for some successful virtual worlds, adult communities are not just a niche—they are the economic and social engine that keeps the lights on. I have frequently cited Second Life as the prime example of a platform that understands the value of adult content. On my blog, I’ve noted that the adult-rated regions of Second Life generate a good portion of the platform’s revenue through land tier fees and the sale of virtual goods (clothing, skins, animations). In contrast, I wrote about Sansar’s early decision to strictly moderate content and its struggle to establish a clear policy on adult material. I argued that by trying to keep the platform “brand-safe” for corporate partners, they essentially “cut off their nose to spite their face,” alienating a potential demographic of creators and consumers who were ready to spend money on higher-fidelity adult experiences. And the corporate clients never came anyway!!

I believe that the ability to explore one’s identity—including its sexual or adult aspects—is fundamental to the metaverse experience. For example, both Second Life and VRChat tend to attract the trans community, giving them a way to experiment with how they represent themselves in a way that might be difficult or impossible to do in real life (particularly at a time when trans people are increasingly under attack in certain jurisdictions). Platforms that ban adult content often end up banning people by extension. If a platform’s moderation is too aggressive, it can lead to the marginalization of subcultures (like the furry community or the trans community) who use virtual worlds as a safe space for exploration. This aligns with Andy’s focus on “presence” and “feeling seen”. Andy argues that gathering spaces should be “smaller, weirder,” and more human. I have argued that by refusing to host adult content, platforms are choosing “corporate safety” over “human authenticity.” They are creating “noise” for brands rather than “spaces that matter” to real people.

One of my core arguments is that you cannot impose a culture on a virtual world; the users bring the culture with them. I’ve pointed out that in almost every successful social VR platform (like VRChat), “NSFW” content and communities exist regardless of official policies. Trying to ban these things is like trying to stop the tide with a broom. Platforms that fight their own communities on this issue usually lose the “heart and soul” that Andy Fidel says is required for a space to be successful. Andy speaks about “architecting belonging” and building spaces like cities. A real-life city has red-light districts, gay bathhouses, private clubs, and adult stores. By refusing to allow these “niche micro-communities” to exist, platform owners are failing to be the architects of a real society and are instead acting as corporate landlords of a sanitized shopping mall.

Okay, enough ranting. Here’s my slide presentation, which you can download to read the rest of my slides and my speaking notes:

Your Metaverse Is Too Small VWBPE Conference 20 March 2026Download

Please note: while Philip Rosedale’s keynote speech on the first day of the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference on Thursday, March 19th has already been uploaded to the VWBPE YouTube channel, mine has not yet been uploaded to view. When it is, I will update this blogpost with a link to the video of my talk.

UPDATE March 30th, 2026: The video of my presentation in Second Life has now been uploaded to the VWBPE YouTube channel! Here it is (and I haven’t even watched it myself yet):

UPDATED! Generative AI Update, March 2026: My Updated Presentation on Artificial Intelligence and GenAI, Plus My First Thoughts on the Claude Add-In for PowerPoint, and Yet Another Head-to-Head Comparison Between Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT

I have used (and reported on) my use of generative AI tools extensively in this blogpost, but my writing is all my own, and I have not edited it or polished it using any GenAI tools.

UPDATE March 7th, 2026: I have updated this blogpost a bit, and included some more images and screen captures of the reports generated by Gemin, Claude, and ChatGPT in the head-to-head comparison section (the third part).

I am (as you can clearly tell by this absurdly long blogpost title) trying to do three related things here. If you want, you can skip to the very end, where there will be an executive summary, where I have some thoughts to share about (waves hands) all this.

First, I wanted to share an updated version of the original slide presentation on artificial intelligence and generative AI, which I shared in a December 2025 blogpost. I used to think that keeping track of the many metaverse platforms I blog about was a task similar to herding cats, but let me tell you, it was a breeze compared to trying to stay abreast of all the rapidly changing and accelerating developments in generative AI!

Keeping on top of developments in generative AI is like herding cats, where the cats are multiplying and mutating!
One of the updated comparison charts in my PowerPoint slide deck (see link below to download)

Below is my updated PowerPoint slide presentation, complete with my speaker notes, for you to download and use as you wish, with some stipulations. I am using the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, which gives the following rights and restrictions):

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

This license requires that reusers give credit to the creator. It allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, for noncommercial purposes only. If others modify or adapt the material, they must license the modified material under identical terms.

BY: Credit must be given to you, the creator.

NC: Only noncommercial use of your work is permitted. Noncommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation.

SA: Adaptations must be shared under the same terms.

(The tool I used to determine the appropriate Creative Commons licence can be found here: https://creativecommons.org/chooser/.)

So, with all that said, here is my PowerPoint presentation (please click on the text link or the black Download button under the picture, not the picture itself):

Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI Presentation Ryan Schultz 4 March 2026 Creative Commons for BlogDownload
NEW: Claude a just released add-ins for Microsoft Office

Second, today I installed a brand-new add-in from Anthropic’s Claude GenAI tool, which is supposed to work with Microsoft PowerPoint. This is an initial review of a very beta product.

And I have an actual real-world use case against which I will be trying out this new add-in: the design of an actual keynote presentation which I will be giving in a couple of weeks. (I am also using it in the third section, but in a different test of all three of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.)

Now, before I get into this, I should explain that I have tried in the past with all three GenAI tools on which I currently have paid accounts (OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini) to create a PowerPoint slide deck presentation design—only to get highly disappointing and completely unusable results back. So I was not expecting much here, particularly as this is a still a research beta version of the PowerPoint add-in.

My initial prompt to the Claude add-in to Microsoft PowerPoint was:

Please create a new PowerPoint slide presentation design with the title of the presentation being: “Your Metaverse Is Too Small: How the Biases and Preconceptions of Virtual Worlds Hinder Their Use in Education.” The theme of the talk is educational uses of virtual worlds, social VR, and the metaverse in general. I want to have some nice background images to use in some of my slides, as well as a visually pleasing title slide. I’d prefer blue as a colour in the slide deck theme, thanks!

And Claude chugged away on my request, keeping my posted on what it was doing:

And it even prompted me to be sure I wanted to delete the Claude add-in help slide!

The set-up for the title slide took a long, loooong time, much longer than I would taken to click on the Designer button in the PowerPoint toolbar and just select one of the default options, and a colour scheme. Eventually, I just gave up on waiting and went off to work on another task, leaving Claude to beaver away. After fifteen minutes, I realized that I still had to explicitly okay the clearing of the original slide design (inset Homer Simpson “D’oh!“), which I did, so that the work could continue.

If I could summarize the result in one word, it would be: meh (again, shout-out to The Simpsons):

I mean, I could easily do better than this myself. And two dots do not make, as I asked for, “some nice background images to use in some of my slides, as well as a visually pleasing title slide.” Here’s my section title slide:

Again, extremely underwhelming, and frankly, not an improvement at all over my previous failed attempts to generate a PowerPoint slide presentation design using any of the GenAI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini). Mind you, I have deliberately stayed away from using the image-generation tools in these products; I can spot a GenAI-produced image from a mile away by this point, having been playing around with these tools, off and on, since they first came out in 2022.

Claude continued to generate all the standard versions of PowerPoint slides in this theme, ending with a final slide that, I must confess, I kind of liked the look of (although, again, I would have preferred some sort of background image):

This is where the process got interesting, as I finally decided to stop having to manually okay each individual step, and just gave Claude carte blanche to do whatever it felt was best. (I mean, the worst that could happen was that it come up with something I hated so much that I threw it away and started over.)

Claude was still working away while I took my lunch break, giving feedback along the lines of “Build stunning title slide design.” 🙄 (I’ll be the judge of what’s considered stunning, Claude. Calm the fuck down.)

Here’s the final result, my “stunning” title slide (insert RuPaul’s Drag Race shade death rattle):

The addition of three pieces of clip art in the upper right corner of the slide, plus a few more bubbles/dots. So, yes, this is, once again, a complete fail. I will probably still use this as a basic slide design, but obviously I will be locating and using my own images to illustrate it. This is now the second new tool in a week (first Claude Cowork and now Claude PowerPoint add-in) which has utterly failed at the tasks given it. I am not impressed.

Third, and finally, thank God, I had much better luck was in issuing all three general-purpose GenAI tools the exact same text prompt, a technique I had used before here (and one which I found very useful in comparing and contrasting the responses):

I am writing a keynote presentation on the mistakes companies make when creating, designing, and marketing the following product category: virtual worlds, social VR/AR, and metaverse platforms in general. Please give me a list of failed or shut down metaverse platforms, along with reasons why they might have failed. Please cite both academic and industry sources of information in your answer.

In all cases, I used the latest models as specified in Ethan Mollick’s latest AI Guide:

  • ChatGPT’s GPT 5.2 Thinking with the Extended Thinking option;
  • Claude Opus 4.2 Extended Thinking with the Research option; and
  • Gemini 3 Thinking with the Deep Research option.

Unlike the last comparison, I’m not going to go into great detail on the results (because I will be using some of these results, once they are double-checked against more authoritative sources, in an actual keynote presentation I will be delivering later this month). Instead, I will my general overall impression of each report (and all three did provide a detailed report with citations).

Please note that I deliberately left it up to the specific GenAI tool to define what “failed” or “shut down” means, how far back and how thoroughly to search for failed platforms, and what metaverse platforms to include or exclude from its final report. As always, I find the differences between the reports to be an interesting way to compare and contrast the results, so below I will give some basic statistics:

GenAI Tool# Failed Platforms ListedTime Range of Failed Platforms# Citations in Final Report
ChatGPT152003 to 202623
Claude13(start dates not given) to 2023/”effectively failed, still limping along”30
Gemini92009 to 2024 (but some platforms had no timeline information given)33

While ChatGPT was the most thorough in listing failed metaverse platforms, and seems to have gone the furthest back in time (including There.com, which launched back in 2003!), it also had the fewest number of citations, and most of them were historical, platform-related announcements (e.g. a 2020 announcement of the shutdown of the then-social-VR platform High Fidelity by its CEO) rather than peer-reviewed academic journal articles (although there were a couple of those, too). While Claude had more citations, a review of those showed mostly blogs and news websites, with fewer references to actual academic research papers (probably because much of that content is locked behind academic publisher paywalls, although there were still quite a few academic references to free sources such as ResearchGate and PubMed Central/PMC; see the Claude report image below for one section which did focus on academic sources). Of the three, Gemini’s 33 citations used included the most resources which I would consider academic, from a good range of different publishers (as well as more informal websites). Interestingly, Gemini also included a list of resources which it looked at, but chose not to include in the final report, something which neither ChatGPT nor Claude offered! I thought that was particularly valuable, in case something else caught my eye to follow up on. Gemini for the win here.

Gemini was also notable for the strong, overarching narrative structure to its report, something which I had also noticed in previous queries using this GenAI tool. Gemini has clearly been trained well in telling a cohesive story! However, Claude was also notable for listing, in a separate section of its report, what it called “cross-cutting failure themes” in its 13 examined metaverse failures (which is definitely a phrase I will be stealing for my final keynote presentation!). By comparison, the final report from ChatGPT, while thorough, was jargon-heavy, poorly-formatted, and seemed to lack the final polish of its competitors. For example, there were three separate sections titled “failure themes and comparative analysis,” “theme-to-platform mapping,” (?!??) and “top 10 failures by primary cause.” It was, in my opinion, the poorest of the three reports generated, just in terms of sheer (lack of) organization and narrative. Again, Gemini for the win!

Gemini’s report had a strong, overarching narrative structure—something which I have noticed seems to be a particular strength of this GenAI tool, a sort of final overall polish to the text that ChatGPT, in particular, was lacking in its report (see below).
Claude’s report had a summary section titled “cross-cutting failure themes,” which I am definitely stealing for my keynote presentation!
Compared to the Gemini report, the ChatGPT report was jargon-heavy and poorly-formatted.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: So, here are my final thoughts.

  • It is getting harder and harder (in fact, almost a full-time job) to keep on top of what is fast becoming an arms race between the top three general-purpose generative AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini), not to mention an ever-growing legion of more narrowly-focused applications, which might be better at certain specific tasks, such as writing programming code or generating music.
  • While Claude seems to be good at putting new agentic (e.g. Claude Cowork) and add-in tools (Claude for PowerPoint) into the hands of its users first, my personal experience with these new tools has been very disappointing, even comically bad. However, Claude’s chatbot interface works well for generating detailed answers with citations (although slightly edged out by Gemini).
  • I am impressed by Gemini’s consistent ability to create a strong narrative structure within its generated reports, something in which ChatGPT in particular is noticeably lacking. It also came first in a key metric: actual citations to academic literature, not just freely-accessible websites (blogs and news articles).
  • If I were forced to rank the three GenAI tools by just this one head-to-head-to-head comparison (i.e. the third part of my blogpost), I would rank them as follows:
    • 1st: Google Gemini.
    • 2nd: Anthropic Claude.
    • 3rd. OpenAI ChatGPT.
  • Again, when these GenAI tools work, they work well (sometimes very well!), but they they fail, they fail spectacularly. Which, in my mind, is another reason why it is good to put these tools to the test regularly, and use them in real-life situations, so that you can learn what they are good and bad at!

An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence in General, and Generative AI in Particular

I have already written at length about my neck and shoulder pain, for which I am working with my doctor, a physiotherapist, and a massage therapist to treat. I’ve also had an ergonomist come and do an assessment and adjustment of my workstations at my employer, the University of Manitoba (I’m still waiting for his final report, with a shopping list of equipment which will be purchased to help me get through an eight-hour workday without pain). I am still very much in the process of learning which actions are detrimental to the couple of deteriorating cervical joints in my spine, and which are more beneficial!

For example, you would think that having the extra weight of a virtual reality headset on my noggin would make things worse. However, I have been astonished to discover that my neck does not become as sore, as quickly, when I am using the Mac Virtual Display feature on my Apple Vision Pro, along with my MacBook Pro at work!

Therefore, I have been working 3 to 4 hours a day like this, as opposed to just using my MacBook Pro with an external monitor attached. The ergonomist did set me up with a temporary notebook riser, adjusted so that I am not hunched over the keyboard, and aligned so the top of both the MacBook Pro screen and the external monitor are both at eye level. I find that working like this, without my AVP, my neck and shoulders still start to ache after about two hours, and I have to stop, take a break, go for a walk, and do some of my physiotherapy exercises. As I mentioned earlier, this is a learning process.

On Wednesday, at lunchtime, I got up from my MacBook Pro, unplugged my Apple Vision Pro from its battery charging cable (I tend to leave it plugged in when I am working seated) and, while still wearing my AVP, went to the washroom. My coworkers in the library are already well-used to seeing this strange person wandering around with a VR headset on, and my vision while wearing it is almost as good as it is when I wear my glasses, so I often do this if I have to make a short walk to the printer, or in this case, the washroom.

However, on my way back from the washroom, disaster struck. I accidentally got the cord between my Apple Vision Pro (on my head) and its battery (sitting in the front left pocket of my pants) caught in a metal part of the door to my office cubicle space when I was coming back in from the washroom. My AVP is okay, but I wrenched my already-painful neck badly, and as a result, made a bad situation even worse. (Lesson learned; you need to take that damn power cord into account when moving around!)

As a result, I have been off sick from work for two and half days this week, spending a lot of my time either lying in bed or lying on the sofa. On top of that, we have had not one, but two Alberta Clippers roar through Winnipeg on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, so I have been apartment-bound as well as largely bed-bound. I just find it ironic that the very thing that seems to make my pain more bearable (the Apple Vision Pro) can also make it more severe! This has just not been my week.

Anyway, this is my usual off-topic preamble to the real purpose of today’s blogpost. I had promised that I would share with you, my blog readers, the artificial intelligence presentation I had been researching since this summer, which I have recently delivered to three separate audiences: University of Manitoba graduate students, graduate student advisors, and the professors and instructors in the Faculty of Agriculture and Food Sciences (the latter group for whom I am the liaison librarian, and from where the original request to create and give this talk was made by the chair of the agriculture library committee, many months ago). And while this talk was overall very well-received by my audiences, I did receive some negative feedback, and I wanted to talk a little bit about that as well. AI is a divisive topic in an already-divisive age.

I’m going to share an edited version of my PowerPoint slide presentation, with some University of Manitoba-specific bits removed, as well as any contact information removed (sorry, the UM faculty, staff, and students have the right to call on me with questions after my presentation, as I am their liaison librarian; you don’t 😉 ).

Also, I will be transparent about how I used generative AI tools in creating this PowerPoint presentation. I currently have paid-for (US$17-20 a month) accounts on three general-purpose generative AI tools: OpenAI’s ChatGPT; Anthropic’s Claude; and Google’s Gemini. These are the “top three” general-purpose generative AI tools currently recommended by Ethan Mollick (more on him later in this post). Do I plan to keep paying for all three? No. But I have found it highly instructive to enter the exact same text prompt into all three tools, and then compare the results!

In addition to conducting my own research into artificial intelligence in general and generative AI in particular, I used both ChatGPT and Claude to do additional research into this topic, some of which made it into this presentation. I also had a lot of text-heavy slides in the first draft of my PowerPoint presentation, so I asked Google Gemini to provide suggestions on how to reformat my slide presentation to have fewer bullet points per slide (which I think it did a pretty good job at).

I also did try to ask both ChatGPT and Gemini to redesign the theme and design aspects of my PowerPoint slides, but I was extremely unsatisfied with the results, despite several attempts, and I finally gave up on using AI for that task. So please keep in mind that generative AI (which I will refer to as GenAI from here on out) can still fail miserably at some tasks you put it to work on!

Here is my PowerPoint slide presentation, complete with my speaker notes, for you to download and use as you wish, with some stipulations. I am using the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, which gives the following rights and restrictions):

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

This license requires that reusers give credit to the creator. It allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, for noncommercial purposes only. If others modify or adapt the material, they must license the modified material under identical terms.

BY: Credit must be given to you, the creator.

NC: Only noncommercial use of your work is permitted. Noncommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation.

SA: Adaptations must be shared under the same terms.

(The tool I used to determine the appropriate Creative Commons licence can be found here: https://creativecommons.org/chooser/.)

So, with all that said, here is my PowerPoint presentation (please click on the Download link under the picture, not the picture):

Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI Presentation Ryan Schultz blog version 19 Dec 2025Download

In addition to sharing my slide presentation with you, I wanted to highlight a few resources which I discussed within it, which you might find useful. These are books and websites which I used as I worked my way up the learning curve associated with AI in general, and the new wave of GenAI tools in particular.

I start off with a bigger-picture look at the whole forest of artificial intelligence, later narrowing my focus to look at GenAI tools, a new subset of greater AI. First, a really good layperson’s guide to GenAI is a 2024 book by Ethan Mollick, titled Co-Intelligence (see image, right). One thing I want people to remember is that the new wave of GenAI tools only dates back to 2022, when the capabilities of these new tools (ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, etc.) first captured the general public’s imagination, and stoked their fears. There are lots of published books about AI, but if they were published before 2022, they won’t cover the part of AI that is making the most noise right now. Also, keep in mind that any print/published book will soon be outdated, because the field of GenAI is evolving so rapidly!

Ethan does a good job of covering the territory, and I share with you his four rules of AI:

•Principle 1: Always invite GenAI to the table. You should try inviting AI to help you in everything you do, barring any legal or ethical issues, to learn its capabilities and failures.

•Principle 2: Be the human in the loop. GenAI works best with human help; always double-check its work.

•Principle 3: Treat GenAI like a person (but tell it what kind of person it is). Give it a specific persona, context, and constraints for better results. For example, you’ll get better results from the detailed prompt “Act as a witty comedian and generate some slogans for my product that will make people laugh” instead of the more generic prompt “Generate some slogans for my product.”

•Principle 4: Assume that this is the worst GenAI tool you will ever use. Generative AI tools are advancing and evolving rapidly.

Second, I want to share with you an online course from Anthropic, the makers of the GenAI tool Claude. This course, which I worked through this summer, is called AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations, and you do not need to use Claude to work through the exercises—you can use any GenAI tool you wish. The focus of this 14-lecture course is to learn how to collaborate with GenAI systems effectively, efficiently, ethically, and safely.

One of the concepts taught in the AI Fluency course is what Anthropic calls the four D’s: the four key competencies of AI fluency (they seem to be big on alliteration!).

•Delegation: deciding what work should be done by humans, what work should be done by AI, and how to distribute tasks between them.

•Description: effectively communicating with AI tools, including clearly defining outputs, guiding AI processes, and specifying desired AI behaviours and interactions.

•Discernment: thoughtfully and critically evaluating AI outputs, processes, behaviours, and interactions (assessing quality, accuracy, appropriateness, and areas for improvement).

•Diligence: using AI responsibly and ethically (maintaining transparency and taking accountability for AI-assisted work; an example of this is when I described in detail which GenAI tools I used, and how I used them, in creating the PowerPoint slide presentation, earlier in this post.)

Finally, I share with you what I found to be a very helpful guide prepared by a librarian, Nicole Hennig, about how to stay on top of the rapidly evolving and accelerating field of GenAI. You can obtain a copy of her 2025 guide here. This is as good a place as any to start working your way up the learning curve (as I first did, with the 2024 edition of her guide). Nicole offers a bounty of valuable tips, tricks, suggestions of people to follow, and advice on how best to keep up with the roiling sea of change which is currently taking place in GenAI!

Finally, I wanted to talk a bit about the divisive nature of GenAI. AI/GenAI seems to be a very polarizing topic, especially in the field of higher education! While I did try to present a balanced viewpoint on generative AI tools, talking about both the good and the bad, I did receive some feedback from a few people who felt that my presentation was too…positive? And that, despite the warnings in my talk about some very serious problems with GenAI tools, I had neglected to portray GenAI’s more negative aspects in a more forceful way.

For example, one agriculture professor, in an email after my talk, said this about the Anthropic online course in AI Fluency, a learning resource which I had mentioned in the previous section of this blogpost, as well as in my slide presentation:

…I know you were recommending the AI class that was created by Anthropic, and how it is agnostic to the AI used, and just a good introduction to use. I’ll admit that I have not taken the course  (I am now intrigued and will try to), but I couldn’t help thinking when you introduced it, of courses on appropriate opioid prescribing practices made by Purdue pharma.

Ouch. Fair point, but painful comparison (and I say that as someone who is now actually suffering from physical pain, as I stated up top). So I wanted to end this blogpost with a brief discussion about how some intelligent but more skeptical observers are responding to the tidal wave of GenAI tools washing over society as a whole, and share links to some criticism, as part of providing a larger perspective. I will be the first to admit that I am not an expert in this field, despite what I have learned since this summer! I am a librarian with a computer science degree, which made it easier for me to comprehend some of the more technical aspects of what I was reading, but not as good at the philosophical part of the discussion about GenAI.

The professor who commented on the Anthropic course above shared with me a couple of links to recent critical articles which I, in turn, will share with you. The first link is an Open Letter by 17 scholars, warning about blindly accepting GenAI tools in higher education (post-secondary education, i.e. colleges and universities, although obviously many of the same arguments could also be made about K-12 schooling):

Guest, O., Suarez, M., Müller, B., van Meerkerk, E., Oude Groote Beverborg, A., de Haan, R., Reyes Elizondo, A., Blokpoel, M., Scharfenberg, N., Kleinherenbrink, A., Camerino, I., Woensdregt, M., Monett, D., Brown, J., Avraamidou, L., Alenda-Demoutiez, J., Hermans, F., & van Rooij, I. (2025). Against the Uncritical Adoption of ‘AI’ Technologies in Academia. Zenodo. Retrieved Dec. 19th, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17065099

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously to a) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

The second link is the text of a recent talk by the well-known intellectual, author, speaker, and gadfly Cory Doctorow, who gave his university audience a foretaste of his book on AI, which will be published in 2026:

Doctorow, C. (2025). Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI. Retrieved Dec. 19th, 2025 from https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

Over the summer I wrote a book about what I think about AI, which is really about what I think about AI criticism, and more specifically, how to be a good AI critic. By which I mean: “How to be a critic whose criticism inflicts maximum damage on the parts of AI that are doing the most harm.” I titled the book The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish it in June, 2026.

But you don’t have to wait until then because I am going to break down the entire book’s thesis for you tonight, over the next 40 minutes. I am going to talk fast.

And both Cory Doctorow, and Olivia Guest et al., make some seriously valid points about the negative consequences of a heedless, thoughtless, headlong rush into adopting GenAI tools. Now, you can decide, after reading all this, that you will have absolutely nothing to do with AI and GenAI, and that’s a valid position to take. But will it change the fact that GenAI is already being incorporated into software we use every day? Can the genie be pushed back into the bottle? Doubtful.

So what I am saying is: learn how the enemy (if you see it as “the enemy”) works. Spend a bit of time to become familiar with the GenAI tools, try them out on certain tasks, and see for yourself where and how it succeeds at a particular task, and (more importantly) where and how it fails. I have had some amazing results from using GenAI tools over the past eight months, but I have also experienced situations where I walked away thinking, “this is garbage.” But may I gently suggest that the only way to gain the experience which informs your opinions is to actually use the tools, and not to stick your head in the sand, and refuse to have anything to do with them.

Are we the unwitting and unwilling beta-testers for these products, as they are rolled out and embedded stealthily in products we already know and use? Absolutely. Will there be negative consequences, some foreseen, and others unexpected and unanticipated? Absolutely. Will there be some tasks which GenAI does and does well? Also, yes, absolutely (and it is already happening based on my own experience). All three things can be true at the same time. Like all technology throughout human history, artificial intelligence is a double-edged sword. It can harm as well as heal.

I still think that the best stance on GenAI is to be a skeptical but informed user of the tools (even if you limit yourself to the lesser-powered, free versions). Also, you owe it to yourself to read a variety of viewpoints on the technology, from a range of sources (start with my fellow librarian Nicole Hennig’s excellent guide which I mentioned above, plus my skeptical professor’s two links, and work out from there).

Above all, even with how divisive AI can be as a topic, now is not the time to be locked into either a rigid AI-is-bad or AI-is-good perspective, because both are true at times, and we need to hold space for that unsettling and upsetting fact. And we need to brace ourselves, both personally and as a society, because (as I have stated before on this blog), things are about to get deeply, deeply weird before all this is over.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

My Presentation on Virtual World Building in Second Life (Delivered to a University Course on Virtual World Building and Design)

As I mentioned, shortly after my sixtieth birthday, I gave a one-hour presentation on Second Life, in Second Life, to a graduate class in virtual world building and design, currently being taught at my university (first blogpost; second blogpost).

I am happy to report that my presentation was very well received by the students! It was followed by a “field trip” to a separate building region to practice some old-world prim building for an hour, and I was quite impressed by what the students were able to come up with in such a short period of time. (And no, you don’t get to see any of it; I have set up the short-term rental so that only students taking this class can access it, build on it, and yes, even terraform it, to their hearts’ delight!)

Here is my PowerPoint slide presentation from my Second Life lecture given the evening of January 31st, 2024, minus the final slide where I gave the students all the different ways that they could get a hold of me! (Sorry, blog readers, all you get is the comments section on this blog post! I’m gonna have my hands full supporting an entire class; I don’t have time to support all of you, too!)

Just click on the download button to save a copy to your hard drive, to view in your version of PowerPoint (or export to Google Slides or whatever you do use to view slides):

Building-Virtual-Worlds-Presentation-on-Second-Life-6-Feb-2024Download

After consulting with the two professors teaching the course, we have decided to extend the rental on the building region for the class to the end of this term, so that any students who wish to complete a 3D building assignment for the course can do so in Second Life. (Note that students are exploring many different virtual world platforms, both 2D and 3D, including some in virtual reality, although the latter is limited by technical constraints, i.e. the number of VR headsets available to use.)

So my role for this graduate-level course is not yet complete! In addition to delivering a lecture on Second Life, and a demonstration of how to use the in-world building tools, I will now also be the Second Life resource person for the class until mid-April, as the students apply what they are learning in this virtual world design class to an in-world building project!

I have told the class that, if I do not know the answer to their questions and problems, I should be able to find somebody who can answer with authority. So don’t be too terribly surprised if I do reach out with questions about, say, how to beat optimize a mesh model created in Blender for uploading to Second Life—because yes, in my presentation I do cover both the old-fashioned prim-building and the more modern mesh way of creating content (as detail-free and hand-wavy as the latter is!). Trust and believe, I had to do a bit of research myself to write that particular part of my presentation, since I am more of a freebie fashionista than a content creator.

I did set up a comparison of some older, prim-built furniture (to the right in the pictures below) with more modern mesh model furniture (to the left), so students can inspect them and compare the land impact of them.

For example, the grey-and-red metal swivel desk chair on the right (in front of the big grey desk) has a land impact of 39 (?!), whereas the wooden chair in front of the desk on the left has a land impact of only 2, while containing much greater and finer detail than the prim-built version. And so on, with all the other pieces. What better way to demonstrate the impact that mesh content creation has had on the grid than to show both old and new items, so students can directly compare?

I also put out a circa-2003 house side-by-side with a circa-2023 house, so the students could see how far that art of domicile building has come in 20 years!

So, anyway, back to the graduate class. I expect a few panicky moments when I will definitely be reaching out to the true Second Life experts, all of you, my faithful readers, to help me get through these next few months—especially on the finer points of modern mesh modeling and uploading! (Pray for me.)