Understanding the Excitement for AI such as ChatGPT and MidJourney in your Future Practice.

The importance of technologies such as ChatGPT and MidJourney can not be understated when it comes to the world of Architectural design. ChatGPT allows us to do extremely advanced searches, in many cases generating better information than a Google search, as well as write papers, analyze resumes and provide feedback on improvements, and more importantly write as well as suggest actual code that can be used in Dynamo and other programming scenarios. You can find their site here: https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/

On the surface, the automation of writing code, resumes, searching for information, etc may seem like something you would skip. It's worth it, but I understand why you would skip it. But now look at what else technology like this will be allowing us to do in the very near future. You will be able to search for similar traits in the structures built by a client and selected during the selection process and generate a "cheat sheet" to win work. You could ask it questions about typical materials used in their structures or the links to materials that meet specific design/code criteria and have it generate a list for your review. You could query a database of every project your firm ever did that met certain criteria and have it generate a list of current employees that worked on those projects for staffing and asking questions. Best of all, this could be done with absolutely no advanced training, just a quick "search class" on the basics and the real-world language that can be used to optimize your reports.

A related technology is MidJourney. Imagine typing in search terms similar to ChatGPT and having the computer begin to generate various design ideas that can be further refined by you and your team. Those search terms could even be entered by copying and pasting the data you received from ChatGPT into MidJourney to provide you with multiple variations of your design which you can continue to allow the computer to refine. These are design decisions based on the hard data of the architectural program, past projects, current forecasted costs for construction and lifecycle, and much more.

All this is the future as it goes beyond one technology and combines some of our best current options into more comprehensive solutions. Accessing data we've not been able to inquire about before, generating potential design options based on everything from requirements to community factors to client preferences and your own firm's signature style. While this may all seem like the far future, that is only true if the far future is between today and 5 years from now or 10 years from now, dependent on your industry and investment in newly developed tools. These tools will be available to not only generate your own "secret recipe" for project and client success but to mine data from online repositories such as BIM 360 or Dropbox to create entire design ecosystems in real-life language that most employees will be able to use at but a thought. While it does take some of the Algorithmic design aspects out of our hands, it's still going to be a powerful tool to be used by the designers of the future.