When There Is No Intelligence in Artificial Intelligence
When architects talk about AI, it triggers me into a Groundhog Day–like reliving of the dire warnings against computer-aided design (CAD) in the 1980s: The field would be decimated, rendered obsolete. But just as CAD was not design, artificial intelligence is not intelligence.
Some architects decry the darkness of impending technology to explain the bland buildings that are carpet-bombing our landscape. This design malaise is not due to how these buildings were drawn. Excuses of economics, technology, and even the lack of available trades cannot belie the essential truth that architects design using the tools they have. Humans are the creators, and creation is facilitated, not determined by, the means and methods of making.
As revealed by the initial terror over CAD, the prime fear of architects with regard to AI is not the loss of control, but the loss of their job. Having a job when your life has become a mission is terrifying. Architects fear that they will be the victims of profiteers, whose greed is furthered by the reduction of humans it takes to design and convey the information of a design: Saving cost by killing jobs, thus making more profit for the developer or less cost of the architect for the patron. I heard those same fears voiced in 1985, when CAD became inevitable.
Forty years between existential terrors has one simple constant that is present in almost every evolution in the human condition: fear. The Great Unknowns are coming faster and with more universal projection than was possible four decades ago. So there is more fear.
But there is also an absurd presumption of power in new technology. The use of CATIA (computer-aided three-dimensional interactive application), developed for the aircraft industry, famously facilitated Frank Gehry’s design process. After a generation of living with Gehry’s creations, it’s clear that CATIA could not make his artful efforts have more meaning than the analog means and methods of Eero Saarinen or Antonio Gaudi.
The folly of fear is best countered by the fearless: the young. In a seminar at the University of Hartford, a guileless grad student pinned up his work: a house. There were three designs. “I took my design and fed it into AI, and these came out,” he began. They were polished. plausible, and, well, not much different from the student’s original design. Of course, he was using a free version of a cheap program, but the stakes were low: a college project in early idea generation.
AI is still in its early generation, too. If your internet algorithms are set to “architecture,” “design,” or “building,” you’re flooded with unsolicited images—and in recent years, the automatic reaction (triggered by the ever-present algorithm) has generated endless images from foreign lands, where these words mean AI images.
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The mystifying 2D results appear to be randomly generated, almost brain-dead compositions: floor plans with no windows in a central living room, an entry to the building through a bathroom, kitchens isolated in a windowless closet, often with no evidence of any site condition other than flat.
The 2D exteriors are equally pastiched shapes in random material variety: blank white walls that become roofs, stone facades that somehow float, voids that have no access or meaning beyond shape. All somehow intended to have the viewer throw money at the cheap design images. I am reminded of the first drum machines of disco, and the introduction of Auto-Tune in rap and R&B—early stabs at refining technology, once self-mockingly obvious, now woven and refined seamlessly into music.
We often respond to fear with law: When CAD threatened jobs in architecture, there was (and is) a response requiring a professional degree, then an architect’s license to build anything and continuing education credits to maintain that license. This system preserves jobs in architecture, across the profession. I think the same fears will prompt mandates and controls limiting AI use. Law does not confer, nor limit, value, and AI will connect those who want to build with designers who can use it, no matter the legalities imposed.
Frank Lloyd Wright had no degree or license in architecture. I am sure he would use CAD or AI if it had been part of his apprenticeship. The ability to build is helped by every technology, but that technology does not dehumanize; it simply focuses the humans who use it.
To paraphrase FDR, the only thing architects have to fear is fear itself. But those words were uttered during the Great Depression. Now we’re in the Great Confusion—and that’s fearful enough.