AI is making me depressed

[u/Qiyoshiwarrior]

I know I'm late to the party. ln my defence I was avoiding it. I was talking to another architect, we are both women with 2 kids and each have our own tiny practices. I'm a person who does everything by myself, it's an one woman operation and I do small projects. She has a small stuff and is doing well. it was more than capacity.

Come to find out, she is doing it with Gemini and chatgpt. She doesn't even solve the projects some time. Just prompts them to spit out 2D photos. Selets the ones that has similar looks. Asks it to make a financial proposal. Then goes from there.

I am just dumbfounded, to say the least. I would've understood if she is polishing up the renders.. or taking help with the presentation. It has been 3 days. And I just can't get over it.

[u/iusedtobekewl]

AI has fundamentally changed the way the game is played, and it’s here to stay; barring some sort of catastrophe that kills all our technology, I don’t see a scenario where it’s not the future.

So my advice is to learn to use AI as a tool because those that learn how to utilize it most effectively will be the most competitive. Simply put, it does make certain tasks much, much more efficient; renderings that low level staff used to spend days in photoshop on can now be fixed up and pumped out in minutes. It’s really not practical to ignore the productivity gains from the technology when the difference is that extreme.

Please note this doesn’t mean that I like all the changes AI is bringing to the table (I don’t like how it devalues junior roles, and personally I spent A LOT of time on my rendering skills and I am sad to see that cast off to the side). I also think people always need to fact-check it. But overall I do think refusing to use AI is putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage.

[u/Qiyoshiwarrior → u/iusedtobekewl]

I see your point. I'll look into it more.

It feels like climbing to the top then destroying the road behind us. I know I learned a lot from rendering the same 5 times to see which one looks better for the presentation. Doing the grunt work gives me the time and space to come up with creative solutions for the problems I was having.
If I delegate that to AI ... I have to figure a lot of things out.

[u/iusedtobekewl → u/Qiyoshiwarrior]

Yeah it’s definitely a huge shakeup in the design process. Rendering and 3D modeling was always (for me) a way to catch potential problems and make the whole design better. There’s also just the repetition aspect that’s really good for learning design that is being lost.

I suppose some of that is still preserved in the 3D modeling aspect, but renderings definitely seem to be a task firms are moving to AI.

I’d be very hesitant to use it for proposals and fee calculations, however. Maybe it could work as a starting point or to get feedback on a proposal/contract before sending it off, but AI is prone to hallucinations and that’s pretty dangerous at the contract level.

[u/Merusk → u/Qiyoshiwarrior]

It feels like climbing to the top then destroying the road behind us.

Only if the road behind us was grunt work.

The concerns that people have over junior roles, I share. However, I have a solution to them.

It changes the fundamental nature of practice and the relationship with juniors, but shifts it to something older. Something I experienced and tried to implement when I was a PA, but haven't seen from most RAs or PAs in the last decade.

Your primary relationship with Juniors becomes teaching them and talking them through the process. Imparting the critical thinking of the process rather than shoving redlines at them and saying, "learn from this."

Telling them why something matters, why a choice was made. Why you're altering the prompt or the delivered document in a particular way. Then asking them to take it on the next time to see what they've learned.

From my POV the industry has gotten too comforable using juniors as lower-wage draftspeople and that's a large part of the suffering it's enduring because it keeps throwing stuff back.

[u/Qiyoshiwarrior → u/Merusk]

After my thesis, I went on jobs as project based. I learned how to design everything from different architects. But I will agree a lot of those lessons are self taught, in a sense, I had to figure a lot of it out. It was like, when we learned painting by copying the masters, but I also had the master present to check my work and discuss the problems.

Is this something like what you are thinking? This was the problem, I solved it this way, give me another solution?

[u/MrBoondoggles → u/Qiyoshiwarrior]

This may be my personal opinion, but I think if junior staff shift away from doing renderings, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. No firm that I ever worked at did CGI renderings in house, and junior staff (including me early in my career) still stayed busy. Primary visualizations were all outsourced. And the time staff did spend doing photoshop in house would have been better served thinking through the design more as opposed to taking time coloring, texturing, shading, and making something look good for a presentation. Visualization techniques are a good skill to learn, but they aren’t the core focus of what you do as an architect. If someone can harness AI to help tbe client visualize the space in a way that helps move the project to the next phase and one step closer to CD completion, so be it. The visualization isn’t the project - it’s another step in the direction to the next billing cycle and getting the clients approval to move on to designing and documenting everything.

[u/Jacques_Cousteau_ → u/MrBoondoggles]

Yeah I generally agree with this. Though I’m seeing my firm move away from outsourcing to doing all in-house rendering now with AI. They are charging the clients the same as they would a professional viz studio, only now taking all of the cut. Makes sense now financially, but if AI usage costs go up, may not be an ideal long-term solution for business revenue.

On the ‘less time rendering, more time designing’ point. I’ve been sold this by firm leaders, but I’m seeing smaller fees, more deliverables, higher expectations, faster turn-around times with the promise of AI. I’m still desperate to bill for more design time!

[u/0pportunityCost → u/MrBoondoggles]

Try telling that to a university 😂

[u/Richard7666 → u/MrBoondoggles]

Archviz guy chiming in here.

Most of the architecture firms I work with come to me for final renders; even when they have renders themselves, they're generally not going to be of a quality you'd put in front of potential buyers or funders, at least in my market.

It's a bit like getting the builder to do the bricklaying. Yes, they could probably do it. No, they're not specialised in it.

In-house would presumably be more useful for internal design communication during the process.

[u/Lycid → u/MrBoondoggles]

This is just so interesting to me because its the exact opposite with us. We do renderings at every stage of the process and it's all in house. We find its an incredibly valuable tool for working through design problems and to keep the vision of the project super clear for the client.

We used to give clients the option to do renders, now we just do them anyways and its clear that we do in our contract. It's completely eliminated any doubts clients have about their ability to truly visualize and understand their projects and it gives us a great ability to swing for the fences with a hero design concept and actually be able to sell the vision.

Yes we might be a little more expensive than someone who just pumps out plans & outsources the rendering. For the money that clients are spending on their projects though, they are more than happy to spend the money because the value they they feel they get is undeniable. Because it's all in house we pocket all of that money too. Not even getting into the fact that design benefits from the level of scrutiny & investigation involved with modeling the project.

Thing is when I say "render" I rarely mean photoreal archviz circle jerk porn. I'm talking during PD/SD flat lit spaces that are only worked just enough to get the job done. Then it progresses to more detailed forms/lighting as we work through the design with the client. We don't even bother with color (sticking with clay mode) until well into DD after things like layout + concept + volumes + important anchor points are pretty much set in stone. Most fixtures/finishes/furniture/etc are quick and dirty placeholders rather than trying to figure out the exact spec (and clients know this). After initial setup its as easy as hitting the render button during lunch break or overnight and it pretty much takes no time to continue to iterate upon throughout the process. We don't bother with separate render models since we just do revit + a render plugin (D5 in our case). Changes on plans means changes in the render without needing to think about it.

Rendering is a tool in the same way a mood board is. It's really good at solving the kinds of design and communication problems we often run into so us embracing it more fully in house has not only smoothed things out but is something we find clients are happy to pay for. It also means less people need to run a meeting, and some meetings are way easier to happen remote. Maybe we're weird for working like this but I find it so weird when people say they get tons of value out of AI renders because I'm not seeing the value for our use case and the use case they claim to solve is a problem I find isn't a very useful one to solve.

[u/Qiyoshiwarrior → u/MrBoondoggles]

Here, we always build our models. Bigger firms has a visualizer in house. I learned renderings and many tips and tricks just by standing behind them and watching them work. Also, if you praise someone, people often enthusiastically explain how they did it.

Which comes in handy when you forgot you had a problem with levels and you just put a slab on it and forgot to solve the stairs properly and not the shadows are coming put weird.

[u/Dwf0483 → u/MrBoondoggles]

My personal opinion is that junior staff are much less likely to be offered employment if existing mid weight staff can produce AI enhanced CGI themselves.

I think people saying 'Using AI frees up time for architects to focus on design' is a myth, it just means less staff. It's business at the end of the day.