I’m sick and tired of A.I. bashing, especially from design “professionals”.

I’m old enough to have heard the luddites say, “CAD will destroy architecture” and “Photoshop will kill photography” and all the other doomsday complaints about each new technology.

The harsh reality is that too many “creative professionals” lack real imagination and use their craft skills as a moat to sustain their income, unwilling to accept the actual end results are what their project customers truly seek.

A.I. drains that moat and that means suddenly people who didn’t waste years in design schools learning whatever pompous du-jour crafts were being taught at that time, now have the capability to share their imaginations.

“But! But! Craft so important to the sacred process!!!!!”

No, it’s not.

The cold reality you don’t want to face is that the end result, the product, is all that your customers care about, not how YOU got there. You’re supposed to be professional designers, not wannabe “grande artistes”.

I had architecture professors in the ’90s who truly believed beautiful hand-drafting was somehow intrinsic to the outcome of the architectural process. A sacred craft we absolutely HAD to learn. Which is obviously bullsh*t – customers don’t want a precious drawing set, they want a successful building. Fetishize Piranesi all you want (as my professors did), but he didn’t build a damn thing.

And just as tedious:

“But! But! You need to be thoroughly experienced in the old crafts to develop a sense of ‘taste’!”

No, you don’t.

Are you trying to tell me young professionals who grow up with A.I. tools won’t develop an innate sense of taste? That is completely ego-centric view of your own personal life experience, not at all focused-on end-results. What will happen is they will develop a new sense of “taste” that inconveniently renders yours…antiquated.

Just look at the amazing output of young architecture graduates who fully embrace all the new tech, unencumbered by the old sacred crafts. Parametric design, live rendering, video, 3D printing, on and on. The creativity and quality of their presentations would have been incomprehensible for the best professional design firms just a decade ago.

So, I’m reposting this video I made at the end of last year, comparing the final output of my graduate thesis on interactive spatial environments, which took me a year to produce, to what I could produce in A.I. in one afternoon.

This was the VISION I had in my head, from my imagination, all those years ago. The technologies and crafts of the day only stymied and encumbered me at every step of the way. Good riddance.