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📄 Research Article

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

◐ medium · 2026-05-14generative-ai, higher-ed, student-experience, faculty-development, ai-literacy, faculty-development-genai, scaffolding, slidesqaqa-pedagogical-question-generation, llm

This study evaluated five generative AI tools for creating instructional slides from instructor-authored course notes: NotebookLM, Claude, M365 Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code. Educators assessed slides for accuracy, completeness, and pedagogical soundness.

  • Coding assistants (Cursor, Claude Code) produced the best slides — most accurate, complete, and pedagogically sound.
  • Students rated AI-generated slides as similar in quality to instructor-created slides.
  • Students could not reliably identify which slides were AI-generated.
  • A negative correlation emerged: high quality ratings were associated with lower "AI-generated" guesses, suggesting students associate poor quality with AI origin even when AI slides are good.

    • Pedagogical Implications

    The finding that coding assistants outperform dedicated education tools and general-purpose LLMs suggests that the scaffolding and structured output formats inherent to coding tools may translate to better instructional design outputs. The student bias finding — associating poor quality with AI — connects to AI Literacy research: if students penalize content they suspect is AI-generated, transparency about AI use may backfire unless accompanied by demonstrated quality.

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  • AI Literacy

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    • Citation

    Leinonen, J., Zhang, L., & Hellas, A. (2026). AI-generated slides: Are they good? Can students tell? Proceedings of the Western Canada Conference on Computing Education (WCCCE 2026). arXiv:2605.13532.