When you write about technology—or most subjects, really—there are certain topics that the internet seems to hand down like homework, demanding that Twitter’s vast volunteer army and the semi-professional Substack corps weigh in with a full spectrum of hot takes. The latest such topic has been AI art, specifically DALL-E (a welcome break from previous topics like crypto and the metaverse); as the thinkpieces flooded my inboxes and feeds over the last week, they began to feel like the products of DALL-E prompts themselves, churned out by the human hive mind as reliably as the software churns out its uncanny images. Anyway, you’re currently reading my contribution to the collective effort: A few days ago, Sachin Benny
Second paragraph reminds me of an observation made by (I believe) Senator Ben Sasse, which went something along the lines of: individual fulfillment can be obtained through meaningful production, but not consumption.
Which, as an architect, leads me to be somewhat concerned about architecture education in light of this new technology. The ease with which one can generate some ideas for building designs with DALL-E, however superficial, may be too big of a temptation during a formative time during which one should be learning the craft of design through drawing and thinking and drawing and thinking again. That’s when one’s imagination is put to the test, not an AI machine.
It may prove less disruptive for urban planning, but time will tell. Well, what do you think?
It seems there is a good deal of concerned discussion about how "AI art is going to replace human artists," but it's all coming from the pundits. Are artists themselves as worried about AI art as the twitter / thinkpiece crowd?
Second paragraph reminds me of an observation made by (I believe) Senator Ben Sasse, which went something along the lines of: individual fulfillment can be obtained through meaningful production, but not consumption.
Which, as an architect, leads me to be somewhat concerned about architecture education in light of this new technology. The ease with which one can generate some ideas for building designs with DALL-E, however superficial, may be too big of a temptation during a formative time during which one should be learning the craft of design through drawing and thinking and drawing and thinking again. That’s when one’s imagination is put to the test, not an AI machine.
It may prove less disruptive for urban planning, but time will tell. Well, what do you think?
It seems there is a good deal of concerned discussion about how "AI art is going to replace human artists," but it's all coming from the pundits. Are artists themselves as worried about AI art as the twitter / thinkpiece crowd?
Learned a new word today! Thanks for working “abstruse” in to the article.