Can AI Replace Design Engineers?

With the rise of AI and the release of Chat GPT, a lot of speculation has arisen around what the future will look like. Artists have been debating whether it’s unfair to allow AI to produce so much art for free or if you can even call what AI produces “Art” at all. Some industries are less concerned, and I am quietly confident that design engineers can feel secure in our jobs, but let’s put this to the test.

I personally hadn’t used Chat GPT for anything yet and I was intrigued. Chat GPT cannot access the CATIA Part Design app to actually make the part, so I asked it to write a guide which I could follow. We started nice and simple, and I asked Chat GPT: “Write a guide to create a 1m-by-1m cube on CATIA Part Design.”

After a few seconds I received this:

1.????First, select the Part Design workbench in the toolbar at the top of the screen.

2.????Click on the "Create a new part" button to create a new part document.

3.????Once the new part document is open, click on the "Sketcher" workbench in the toolbar.

4.????In the Sketcher workbench, click on the "Rectangle" command to draw a rectangle.

5.????Draw a rectangle of 1m x 1m by clicking on two points on the screen.

6.????Click the "Close the Sketch" command to exit the Sketcher.

7.????Select the "Pad" command in the toolbar and set the height of the pad to 1m.

8.????Select the rectangle you just created as the profile to be extruded.

9.????Click the "OK" button to create the cube.

10.?The 1m-by-1m cube has been created in CATIA Part Design!

I hope this guide was helpful! If you have any further questions or need any assistance, please let me know.

The Results:

A quick and easy ten step guide to create a cube. If we want to nit-pick, I could say that some of the directions indicating where to click are a bit vague so somebody who has not used the software before may struggle to find some of the buttons. For example, the “create new part” button, in V6 at least, doesn’t really exist in those exact terms… but with a few screenshots I could whip this into a handy-dandy guide to teach beginners! And to its credit there is a friendly and personable “hoped this helped” statement at the end, a social cue you can’t always receive from the real engineers! (Kidding)!

What about more complex geometry? This time I typed: “Please may you write a guide to create a 2.5m tall spiral staircase on CATIA Part Design.”

After a few more seconds than before I received:

Absolutely! Here is a step-by-step guide on how to create a 2.5m tall spiral staircase on CATIA Part Design:

1.????First, select the Part Design workbench in the toolbar at the top of the screen.

2.????Click on the "Create a new part" button to create a new part document.

3.????Once the new part document is open, click on the "Sketcher" workbench in the toolbar.

4.????In the Sketcher workbench, click on the "Circle" command to draw a circle.

5.????Create a circle with a diameter of 1.5m to serve as the base of the staircase.

6.????Open the "Spiral" command from the toolbar.

7.????Specify the desired angle of the spiral and the pitch distance (height) of each loop.

8.????Choose the base circle you created in step 5 as the profile for the spiral.

9.????Set the height of the spiral to 2.5m.

10.?Click "OK" to create the spiral.

11.?Once the spiral is created, exit the Sketcher.

12.?To add the steps, create a sketch on the face of the spiral where each step will be placed.

13.?Draw a rectangle

Reading these steps, I’m slightly less confident in the outcome, and I'm finding it harder to visualise than the cube, so let's make it!

Looking down at the barrel of the part design app I clicked on the sketcher, I now must pick my sketch plane and Chat GPT hasn’t specified one, but in step 5 they do say it’s the base of the staircase, so I’ll pick the top view plane. At the end of step 5, I have this:

Step 6 is where we start to fall apart. There is no “spiral command” in the part design work bench, or in part design’s sketcher. I could stop here and say well, AI has failed the task, but I’m going to give benefit of the doubt as a spiral command does exist, it’s just in the “generative shape design app”, so I’m going to jump there to continue the guide.

So, with the information given in the guide, I cannot complete the spiral curve definition box enough to create any kind of spiral. Additionally, by step 9 it told me to define a spiral “height” and spirals are 2D in CATIA, a 3D spiral would be made using the helix tool. So again – benefit of the doubt – we all get our worms mixed up time to time, let's try that again using the helix tool.

Again, I’m filling in a lot of blanks and heavily relying on my own experience and knowledge to complete what I think it’s trying to create. Rather than an angle I set “number of revolutions” as one floor of spiral staircases tend to have one complete revolution. It didn’t tell me to define the Z axis for the centre of rotation, but that is a necessary step to produce the helix. It did tell me to define the profile as the circle I made but doing that rather than leaving the profile section blank caused unnecessary error messages and the command failed. I’m not calling this all out to be facetious, but if I were to write this guide, I wouldn’t assume this higher level of user knowledge.

At this point I had the helix shown in the screen shot above, and I had already made a lot of corrections and assumptions to get there. With only two steps left before my spiral staircase should be complete, I was pretty much out of hope for Chat GPT. Step 12 asks me to “create a sketch on the face of the spiral where each step will be”. Well, this spiral currently has no faces to sketch on, and even if it did… well step 13, the last step is simply “draw a rectangle”. Needless to say, the instructions are not enough to create a staircase. No polite “hoped this helped!” at the end either, I think it knew it hadn’t been helpful and decided to accept defeat, the silence after step 13 was deafening. The results spoke for themselves:

To prove it wasn’t an impossible task, here’s a model spiral staircase I whipped up using primarily part design and a little bit of generative shape design for flair:

The Results:

My takeaway from this is twofold. Chat GPT was successful in giving enough instructions to create the basic cube geometry. So strictly speaking, it can replace a design engineer if the requirements are incredibly simple.

However, for anything a customer may actually want... not so much. A huge part of a designer’s role is extracting as much detail as possible from a client and reading between the lines or asking further questions to comprehend what they really want and what the parameters for the design are. Ultimately, this proves why Chat GPT cannot take over the design engineer role, it doesn’t know what questions to ask me, it doesn’t know the nuance of the design apps; what they contain, and what their capabilities are. You could argue that with more detailed instructions Chat GPT could have gotten closer to the answer, but this isn’t always available in the design brief and the AI lacks the ability to ask further questions where there’s ambiguity in the design. In the end, it just doesn’t contain the knowledge of design experts, it cannot replicate the years of training, it is not able to perform any on-the-fly problem solving and lacks the level patience and communication it takes to be a?good?design engineer.

Design Engineers one, Chat GPT zero!

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