“Since their introduction to the wider public, artificial intelligence technologies seem prone to change the working landscape for professionals across all fields, and architecture and urban planning are no different. While many fear their negative impact, AI technologies can also be viewed as a different set of tools in the arsenal of architects and designers. As revolutionary as they are, there is a plethora of applications and platforms being developed not to replace, but to aid, offload repetitive tasks, and help visualize ideas or large data sets, all to provide a basis for the architect’s decision-making process.
Among the first AI tools to be used by architects and designers have been image generation engines such as DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, that transform text prompts into images. This encourages designers to use language-based conceptualization, often helping to test out ideas quickly and lowering the knowledge threshold for designing, for better or for worse.“