ICONTECH INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SURVEYS, ENGINEERING, TECHNOLOGY, vol.7, no.3, pp.12-26, 2023 (Peer-Reviewed Journal)
Text-guided generation of images with deep learning technology has made significant advances and has seen an increasing interest since 2021. With these mostly web-based models, users can synthesise photorealistic and high-quality digital images from natural language descriptions with no or little understanding of the underlying technology. Although these AI technologies are in the early phases, there is already an explosion in AI-generated architectural activity. While generative AI technologies propose a new design method for designers and architects, it will undoubtedly redefine the skills, knowledge and competencies that designers should equipped with. This research focuses on understanding the “artificial intelligence – architect” interaction as a design method, specifically the “language as a design driver”, and interrogates the role of the designer in AI-driven design. In the context of the research, the textual inputs (“prompts”) and the outputs of the architectural design studies of 36 subjects generated in Midjourney – a text-to-image latent diffusion model – were analysed in terms of the possible relationships between the language of the prompts, (1) prompt length, (2) descriptive language, (3) specific architecture-related indicators, and the quality of the outputs in two terms of architectural quality and architectural creativity.