AI and Creativity: The Role of AI in Art and Architecture

“AI cannot replace architects,

but architects who use AI can replace those who do not use AI.”

It’s obvious that AI is already having major influence on technical professions, such as medicine, finance, and computer programming, and clearly the usage in these fields is going to increase significantly, and on an accelerated time scale.

But what about in the creative professions? Yes, there too …

After all, deepfakes are essentially AI-created images and videos. They’ve been created with the intent to deceive, but what about creativity that is designed to entertain, inform, and educate? To gain insight into that, I interviewed the incredibly talented artist and architect Dhwani Ashar, who is based in Dubai and works for Buro Happold, a world-renowned architecture and engineering firm.

Dhwani showed me numerous lovely examples of how she uses AI in her work, and then using screen sharing she created some images in the AI graphics program Midjourney, in real time according to prompts that we brainstormed together.

The 20 minute video is really interesting, and I highly recommend you check it out.

Here are some of the highlights from our discussion …

Using Midjourney, Dhwani is able to significantly accelerate the creative process in both her art and architecture work, and in the video she shares numerous images and videos.

She mentioned, for example, that a tedious but necessary aspect of interior design work that used to take up to 40 hours working manually can now be done in about 2 hours using Midjourney. (Interestingly, this is exactly the same 20x productivity gain that Tom Brazil mentioned in another video on this channel. Check out my conversation with Tom here… ) 

Exploring design options is incredibly fast using AI, as she can cycle through multiple possibilities in a matter of minutes, instead of the hours that it would have previously required.

And she’s also using Chat GPT AI to help with engineering work she does. As a Fire Engineering professional, she has to know exactly which section of a one thousand page building code to apply specific engineering designs she does. She uses Chat GPT to help her sort through the massive code book to identify the necessary code sections pertinent to each aspect of her design. 

The examples of her work that she shared with me include detailed renderings of building exteriors and interiors, comics, illustrations for books, sketches, and fly-through videos.

She is well aware, however, that AI cannot do everything. As of today, it’s simply not capable of doing complex tasks such as preparing the highly detailed documents used in building construction.

Hence, she has come to the realization that “AI cannot replace architects, but architects who use AI can replace those who do not use AI.” More likely, not only can they, but they will. And soon …

We have heard exactly the same sentiment expressed by the president of the American Medical Association the trade group that represents one million American physicians. Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, MD, recently commented that, “I know that AI is not going to replace doctors — but doctors who use AI will replace those who don't.”

Well, that’s pretty clear, isn’t it. 

Dhwani recognizes that AI is a tool, and she observes that like all tools, the quality and usefulness of the outputs will depend heavily on the user. It is up to us, in other words, to decide if AI is to be used for the good of society, or if it will cause harm. As current experiences already show, there is clearly enormous  potential for both. And either way, it’s coming at us very, very fast.

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