How might AI affect architects? A Yale expert weighs in

What innovation might disrupt the profession? 

Bernstein: In my view, what we would need is a ChatGPT for the building industry — a fundamental model that can reason about complex, three-dimensional objects that operate over time, like buildings. And that’s extremely hard to do because tools like ChatGPT can’t reason in three dimensions, or temporally. 

Here at the School of Architecture, we did an experiment with Vincent Guerrero, who’s our senior director of advanced technology and a campus leader for AI on the IT side, in which we wrote a highly detailed prompt describing a building, and then gave it to four different image generators. The resulting images were very different from each other and only shared general characteristics like the choice of materials — concrete, glass, etc. So, tools like that can be helpful in terms of sparking ideas: you could ask for 10 pictures for a three-story, concrete-frame building, and it may show you things that you hadn’t thought about.

But, as I said earlier, these tools don’t understand what a building is. If I talk to an AI platform and say, “Okay, now make the floor-to-floor heights 10 feet, 7 inches, and I want spandrel depths at 18 inches instead of 14 inches, and make that glass slightly less reflective,” it might be able to complete the third task because it’s a manipulation of the pixels on the screen. But it can’t address the design of the building itself. 

People talk a lot about multimodality in AI — tools that encompass language, images, voice, and video. A building is the most multimodal thing you can imagine. It has complicated spatial characteristics. It has materiality. There’s a whole logic around designing it, a different logic around building it, and a third logic around using it. This makes creating the built environment a very complex enterprise and we are nowhere near having an AI platform that can reason through all of that. We’re just playing around in a middle zone right now. 

How would we move from the middle zone?

Bernstein: In my book, I argue that there is going to be a liminal period between BIM and useful AI that I call the “data interstice.” Right now, there are hundreds of pieces of software in the building industry spitting out data — we’re digitally generating all kinds of drawings, models, spreadsheets, and reports — but there is no coherent theory of knowledge for organizing it or making it useful training data for AI.

It’s easy to find a legal precedent if you’re an attorney because all the cases are indexed in databases. In the building industry, our data is incredibly disorganized and heterogeneous. We’d need a strategy for organizing and homogenizing it. From there, we might be able to build that AI model that can reason in three dimensions. 

What do you think AI will ultimately mean for the profession?

Bernstein: I think there are aspects of the architectural enterprise that will be accelerated, augmented, and in some cases, possibly replaced by AI. But I do not believe that machines will ever be architects. 

Architects have several responsibilities beyond simply designing buildings. First and foremost, we are responsible for public health and safety, which is why we are licensed to practice. We communicate with our clients to understand how they envision a project. Then we work with builders to translate our design ideas into reality. Can we really delegate these professional responsibilities to an algorithm? Would society want us to do that?  If a project goes badly, a client can sue me because I’m professionally responsible for it. If we were to allocate this responsibility to an algorithm, then that algorithm better have a good insurance policy. 

That said, if Sam Altman [the CEO of OpenAI and a leading proponent of AI’s potential benefits] is right — and a lot of other people are wrong, including me — and we eventually achieve artificial general intelligence that meets and surpasses human intellectual capabilities, then the entire world will fundamentally change, including this profession.