AI for architects, designers and PR

As the emergence of new generative AI chatbots shapes the news agenda, our content editor and in-house ‘AI-expert’ Peter Smisek explores this fast-evolving topic.

Some of these platforms promise to be both leaner and greener than many of the previously available models, which sounds like good news…surely?

In reality it obscures the larger story of AI, which is the technology’s route to becoming all-pervasive. As recently as 2023 the Chartered Institute of Public Relations’ white paper titled ‘Humans needed more than ever’ estimated that at least 40% of PR activities were assisted by AI.

This isn’t reliance on chatbots per se – our social media monitoring tools, news aggregators and spell-checkers already have AI features built into them.

Are architects and designers using AI? Should I be using it too?

Architects have of course been using AI too, whether to help summarise lengthy tender documents and come up with the perfect, lengthy answers to bid questionnaires, optimise interior layouts, help speed up visualisations, or even dream up completely new buildings as they strive to present their clients with an increasing array of options.

Designers, too, have been creating seductive images of unlikely products and surreal environments, sometimes turning them into reality, whether by hand or using additive manufacturing technology.

This is not to say there aren’t caveats. AI is trained on existing, vast datasets, meaning in cannot actually create anything new, it can only calculate, (though with ever greater accuracy) the statistical probability of different linguistic or visual proximities.

This can make it an effective tool when refining copy, analysing large data sets, setting out initial ideations, summarising lengthy documents or providing basic templates.

But it also means an AI bot can sometimes present wrong answers that seem plausible. Worse yet, if the model is ‘trained’ on biased or incomplete data, it can pick up these biases and regurgitate them.

Furthermore, open AI models could be subject to data leaks and harvesting, which means awareness around confidential information is more important than ever.

What does it all mean?

All in all, given detailed prompts, AI can be a useful assistant, but cannot replace the human mind when it comes to knowing the context and nuance of personal interaction, and it can’t make those lateral connections that all comms professionals worth their salt pride themselves on. Our main takeaway is – use AI responsibly, double-check everything and remember to be the critical arbiter.

And do say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to your chatbot. You never know…