If you don't know what you want and don't care what you get AI can hit the mark. What's beyond that has Reg Prentice, CEO of TonicDM wondering.
If you don't know what you want and you don't care what you get, I’ve found AI works very well.
It's great at producing “artwork,” and I enjoy this a lot. Just me and ChatGPT working together to create wonderful, but essentially random, brutalist fantasies. Similarly, if I wanted a house built and I had only a vague idea about what I wanted, and I wasn't critical about what I got, today's AI could probably do a decent job. This is why, for the AEC industry, today's AI tools for property development focus on architecture, and today's AI tools for architects focus on image-making. By performing tasks outside the user’s domain, they avoid the scrutiny of the professional eye.
Becoming a professional means learning a language: a rewiring of the brain over an extended period of time. Specialized language enables specialized thought, often referred to as developing “an eye” or an intuition for something. The professions of artist, property developer, designer and builder have different languages that enable these professionals to know what they want, and it compels them to care about what they get, within their distinct and specialized domains.
A professional artist looking at my ChatGPT images will easily see them for what they are — essentially random exercises in generating something that looks like art. An experienced property developer looking at a pro forma created by a person without property development experience will instantly recognize it as non-functional. Especially with AI, it is easy to convince ourselves that something is fit-for-purpose when that thing lies outside our area of specialty. This has always been the case. If you don't know what you want, and you don't care what you get, it’s not just AI that works well. You could employ anyone with time on their hands and get interesting but essentially random results.
AI is developing quickly. The promise, of course, is of a single AI that will simultaneously have the knowledge of all professions. But will it develop an eye? Will it simultaneously have all eyes, or are all eyes no eyes at all?
