Selling Your Talk — LLMs

It can’t be 2026 without mentioning the how AI & LLMs affect things. It turns out LLMs are really good at writing sales pitches for talks, and if you think about how they work, you can see why. They ingested a huge amount of information from internet, distilled it and then provide it back as LLMs. Of course, one of the things they ingested was every successful abstract and title of every talk on the internet. Unsurprisingly, that makes them good at it.

I’ll say it plainly: don’t let an LLM write your abstract. There are two good reasons.

First, if it does, it’s not your idea anymore, it’s the LLM’s. If someone wants to know what an LLM has to say about something, they can go and ask one. What attendees want from a talk is people’s actual experiences and what they’ve done. If the abstract isn’t in your voice, it’s not your story.

Second, LLMs have tells. The way they produce text is pattern-based, and once you’ve read enough of it you start to spot the patterns. Conference organisers this year are reading a ton of LLM-generated abstracts and if I were an organiser, my concern would be: does this person actually know this topic, or have they just had an LLM generate an abstract? I could feed an LLM a subject I know nothing about, get a convincing-sounding title and abstract back, and know nothing about the topic.

I’m not saying don’t use them at all. What I’m saying is: get your idea, make it your idea, and then, if you want, ask for some alternate wording. Maybe you’re not great at snappy writing so run it through and let it give you suggestions. But look at what it produces and ask whether it still fits and is still what you want to say.

Titles are one place where I’ve found them helpful, snappy titles. One tell to watch for though is having a title like “something something something: something something”. LLMs are very fond of that talk title format. I’m not saying everyone who used that format used an LLM, just that it’s something LLMs do a lot. If you’re writing your own and it comes out that way, at the very least change the punctuation and drop the colon :)