The MBTI Guide to Making Slides with AI
AI · Productivity
Spent the week trying different ways to make slides with AI. Ended up noticing each path maps cleanly onto a different MBTI type.
ESTP — just let AI spit out a .pptx
ESTPs are action-first and allergic to planning. The only metric that matters is "will this pass." Every extra minute spent on the deck is a minute stolen from the rest of their life.
The laziest route fits them perfectly. Tell an AI "make me a Q2 report" and it hands you a .pptx. Gray-white-blue, Calibri, five bullets a slide. Safe. Boring. Impossible to criticize.
AI is genuinely bad at this. Its training data is full of machine-exported PPTX XML with no design intent — it learned the syntax but not the taste. ESTPs don't care. Passable is the goal.
ESFJ — Gamma and other vertical AI slide apps
ESFJs are the ones in every team who care most about how things land for everyone else. They want polish, not edginess. "Will this look like I half-assed it" is the question that keeps them up, not "does this have my voice."
Gamma and similar apps are built for them. Type a topic, get back something that actually looks like a deck. Prettier than raw .pptx, no Slidev to learn. Click to edit text, click to swap themes. Multi-user collaboration included.
The trade-off is sameness — anyone who's seen a Gamma deck will recognize the next one. ESFJs don't mind. "Looks put-together" beats "looks like me."
ENFP — Gemini + Canva Magic Layers
ENFPs are pure idea engines. More concepts than hours, zero patience for repetition. The deck must be different — nothing like the templates everyone else is using.
The flow: ask AI (Gemini, say) to generate images. Images can't be edited natively, so drag the PNG into Canva, open Magic Studio, hit Magic Layers. The image explodes into editable layers.
Every step has visual feedback, so it never feels like chores. The catch: generation is unpredictable, and next time you start from zero. ENFPs don't care — doing the same thing twice is already boring to them.
INTP — Markdown + Slidev
INTPs want the simplest system that works. Their first reaction to any GUI with a hundred buttons is "does it have a CLI."
Markdown is where AI is strongest. Structure, hierarchy, narrative pacing — it nails all three. Slidev eats Markdown and emits slides. Code blocks stay code. Prose stays prose. No drag-and-drop. No font-size dialogs.
INTPs also care about narrative coherence. Align on an outline first, then let AI fill in the body. Once the structure is right, the rest is just typing.
ISTJ — Pencil
ISTJs guard the rules. They can feel a 0.5-point font deviation from across the room. Their real fear isn't effort — it's AI going off-script.
Pencil is interesting because it imports your Figma brand guidelines as hard constraints. Drop your company's style guide in once, and every page AI generates afterward obeys your brand colors, typography, and UI rules. It even supports git-style branches — different clients, different branches.
Lock the rules, put AI inside the box. ISTJs have been waiting for exactly this.
The five paths collapse into two families.
One family asks AI to produce the slide directly — raw .pptx, or vertical apps like Gamma. AI is mediocre here. The training data is all machine-generated decks with no design rationale. It learned the syntax but not the taste.
The other family asks AI to write code that renders to slides — Markdown, React, Figma JSON. This is exactly what AI is best at. Code and structured text are its native tongue.