@Gorgious said:
.......but it is not capable of creation. You can make the case that all art currents and all artists have been directly or indirectly inspired by what came before them, but I do not see this generation of AIs replace the "creative" part of the job of architects, especially because it is so intricately tied to the actual technical needs of every project. It can spit out amazing things, but in order to do that, users have to learn and master a new language, very similarly to what coders here are doing with open source projects.
Before I slept yesterday, I gave Stable Diffusion just the word '''tiger'' as prompt, just for the heck of it, and it gave me this image
That base image would take me days to create in Blender at that level of detail if I modelled from scratch without using assets.
If I spend a couple of hours engineering the prompt in SD, I can tweak that image into my personal vision of what I want the tiger to do or look like. The crux is in the speed of creation and level of stylistic detail / precision that is now possible within a fraction of the time previously spent, and not about whether the AI can be creative or about the artist / designer losing agency. That speed, at that level of fidelity is a game changer that becomes heightened at several orders of magnitude in the hands of skilled artists / designers. If the AEC industry manages to coopt the technology towards their ends. Similar impact should be expected.
Also, there is the ever-growing subject of training data biases. Will it be useful to people in South Asia if the training set only contains apartment plans of Northern American buildings ? How will the trainer be able to gather enough data to train it AI efficiently ? And for what purpose ?
If open source systems exist, clusters should be able to feed in their own data sets to specialize their version of the AI in their respective domains. Communities will just have to do the work to take advantage of the technology. It's like wondering if cars will be useful in communities that lack roads. Of course they won't, but roads are eminently buildable, albeit a resource hungry process, leaving it to the communities to prioritize their resources according to their needs.
It will IMO 100% be used as a tool to make the productivity of the users skyrocket, same as the drawing board in its time, same as the typewriter in its time, same as the personal computer in its time, same as the access to internet in its time. It will 100% be integrated into most softwares that we will be using in a couple of years (look at AI filters in photoshop !), either buried deep in the code so the end-user doesn't even know it's there or out there in the open to help with publicity stunts.
Exactly, every stage of evolution of computing / AI will have the novelty phase, but that will always wear off with adoption and the new ways of doing things will become the new normal. There are now generations of people who have no experience of driving stick shift cars, their own children might not even know what an automatic gear is, if autonomous vehicles become the norm. I rode on my first autonomous vehicles on the DLR trains in London in 2012, it had already become the normal then, but as a visitor, I was intrigued. I had no idea Teslas were coming, and well, here we are!
I'm eagerly waiting for the next generation of "AIs", as I am waiting for the next generation of laser scanning devices, and the next generation of photogrammetry software. And drawing tablets. And Quantum Computers. It will change how we work, and we need to try to predict how if we want to take advantage of it, or at least not let our jobs become obsolete by then. Who draws their technical plans with a pen on paper today ?
Spot on!