Ai in Design
I guess the first newsletter /blog goes to Ai. Since we are a design focused shop it's constantly on my mind because of how powerful it's getting in terms of image creation- it seems like it improves so much every month and I've even seen some other design offices use it to generate sketches, write email, or help label site plans. My stance is that I am generally against ai images for art and architectural renderings. I guess some would say it's “kinda like the printing press” and that we are going to have to adapt, but for what Aaron and I are doing - I really want to facilitate a studio where we lean into the analog / hand-selected nature of our work.
Even as I type this I get suuuper tempted to just throw this ramble into ChatGTP and say “ enhance” or “make this sound better” because I literally never write or type, but I personally love the roughness and imperfections of the human language. Sure.. ill use chatGTP to assist write a big important email to a client or use it to double check if i have a plant spec correct (genus, species, “I love this plant I found will it survive the Austin freeze this year”) but there's something about the informality of imperfect phrases that to me seem more honest. Reality isn't always perfect. If I were to hire a copywriter and they just used ai the whole time why did I even hire them in the first place?
I mean imagine a client pays you to design something and they receive an AI drawing, I would personally be super irritated. Seems like you just fed a machine my ideas and it spits out some glossy image that resembles a Raymond Jungles sketch but if you look closely…it don't make any damn sense. Maybe some people can't tell…which I guess is why corpo are using it so much? I live in Clarksville and every time I drive down South Lamar to go to the movie theater I see this Specs billboard ad and I almost can't tell if it's AI generated or not. This Spec’s just opened up RIGHT next to a small local one by where I live BTW. As I type this I found this reddit post which i thought was kinda funny ->
https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/1orsyp2/i_hate_seeing_specs_tacky_ai_ads_all_over_the_city/
I guess there’s my answer lol.
I get why people like it, because less work to get desired outcome = efficient and epic. But to me most of this is just a race to the bottom. US companies already outsource rendering tasks overseas. Cuts cost and turnover for projects is quicker. Ai will just speed this process up.
Don't get me wrong- we have played with some of the image generation a bit- and some of the generations are okay… I just really hope this doesn't become industry standard. During our process we model out in Sketchup what the project will almost exactly look like (or what we want it to look like). This was a recent hospitality / wellness project that we modeled (you can see the 3D scan archival data as well).
I fed THIS image to chat gtp to make a plan view…
This is the result - Kinda de-skills the profession.
I was in Japan in October and visited the Mori Art Museum. The showcase was an Architecture of Sou Fujimoto exhibit and I was so impressed by all the physical architecture models and sketched designs- I just think I don't want to live in a world where this doesn't exist- seeing the inspired human mind at work- the curiosity and creativity. Not generating profit and cash as quickly and efficiently as humanly possible.
