All In on A.I.

Roman fresco of lions hunting antelopes

Apparently, comic book artists have more integrity than architects. A recent Artnet headline reads: San Diego Comic-Con Bans A.I. Art Following Backlash.

Architects, meanwhile, are trying to rationalize the inevitability of A.I. generated designs. Renderings of human designed (or at least sketched) buildings are one thing, but if A.I. can design commercial real estate, it’s not hard to imagine the average developer preferring to do the job on their own without hiring some finicky architect. Granted, architects have mostly been technophiles for two centuries—after all even Schinkel used cast iron columns to create real versions of Pompeian wall paintings:

https://www.bgc.bard.edu/research/articles/208/karl-friedrich-schinkel-and-berlin

It won’t be long before design software can qualify for building permits (liability will, I imagine, be a sticking point). Building permitters aren’t in the business of keeping architects in business, but protecting the people who use their buildings.

Much of the rationale for Modernist architecture was technological, from using “modern materials” to designing for the modern lifestyle (the bicycles and cars and biplanes phase). Frank Lloyd Wright imagined personal helicopters flying over Broadacre City.

The ways architects made drawings, which hadn’t changed much for centuries, changed continuously over the course of the twentieth century, from ruling pens (my mom drafted airplanes during WWII using them) to Graphos to technical pens (on which I cut my teeth in architecture school). How many remember the first CAD plotters that used actual pens on a rotating wheel to produce drawings? CAD still uses the euphemism “pens” to designate line weights produced by modern inkjet plotters. Students talk about “making a model” when they hit the print button on a 3D printer.

But as convenient, and lazy, it is to say that A.I. “is just another tool,” it’s not. It’s the mind manipulating the tool. Or better, faking being the mind manipulating the tool. Because, so far at least, Artificial Intelligence is fake intelligence, the imitation of the human mind in action. It’s replicating effects, not causes, albeit super-fast and super effectively.

Like ersatz traditional crafts produced in factories, does anyone really know the difference, or care? Mostly not. And, even if it is better than us, who gains in that exchange? Be honest, do you really think A.I. is being trained to produce “art,” or architecture, for some financial gain? As faculty have been telling art and architecture students for decades, there are easier ways to make money. A.I. is learning the nuances of art and architecture so it can score some real cash elsewhere. A.I. generated art is a performance test for some other, larger, gain. I don’t know, or care, what that might be. But the idea that architects are “all in” on A.I. when its mission is to make them irrelevant is fascinating to watch.

My wife says developing A.I. is like the antelopes wanting to make the lions faster and stronger.

Meanwhile, I’ll be drawing and painting with my brain and hand, trying to outrun the lions…