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Will AI Replace Architects?
Spoiler: Not in the near future. But how can it assist us?
Will AI take over architect’s jobs? Thomas Lane in the May 2023 edition of the Building magazine reported that AI can automate 37% of architects’ and engineers’ work. This, however, will likely mean that we can automate more mundane tasks and focus more on strategic and creative tasks. Just as Revit, digital NBS specifications, 3D modelling and real-time rendering software did not overtake architects’ jobs but just changed the way we work, the same is likely to be true of AI tools. New tasks — to do with AI management, for example — will also emerge.
At the time of writing this article we are in the second quarter of 2023 and AI has only fairly recently emerged into public consciousness. It rapidly established itself as the trend of the year, after Open AI’s ChatGPT was made available to the public as a free trial version at the end of 2022. Despite its limitations and originally only having access to data up to the year of 2021, the internet and social media exploded with chatter about ChatGPT and AI in general and the race is on for who can find the best use-case for it.
Many Architects are among the professionals left wondering what it all means for them. Rumours of AI taking over white-collar jobs has caused some concern and reactions range from declining to engage with ChatGPT/ AI, being sceptical about the benefits and being worried about data privacy. Most of us even worry about the potential of Artificial Intelligence to take over the world. How ‘intelligence’ and ‘creativity’ should be defined are debated. Nevertheless, most Architects also approach AI with curiosity, trying to understand whether and how it could be used for our work.
Some of the larger architectural and engineering practices have been experimenting with AI tools for many years already, building their own use cases and customised databases for the AI to work from.
This article has been compiled to begin answering the question of how AI could be used by Architects.
The short answer to whether AI will replace architects is that it’s unlikely to do so in the near future. Reading through the rest of this article will give you an idea why.
