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Comment by ArchitectAnon | Hacker News Reader

I think the thing that most perturbs me about AI is that it takes jobs that involve manipulating colours, light, shade and space directly and turns them into essay writing exercises. As a dyslexic I fucking hate writing essays. 40% of architects are dyslexic. I wouldn't be surprised if that was similar or higher in other creative industries such as filmmaking and illustration. Coincidentally 40% of the prison population is also dyslexic, I wonder if that's where all the spare creatives who are terrible at describing things with words will end up in 20 years time.

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You're entitled to your opinion but this will open up a world of possibilities to people who couldn't work in these fields previously due to their own non-dyslexia disability. Handless intelligent people shouldn't lose out because incumbents don't want to share their lane.

So, the fall of the skilled professional and the rise of anybody who knows how to write prompts?

The AI we have today has very little to do with writing prompts, you still need to understand, correct, glue and edit the results and that is most of the work so you still need skilled professionals.

Pretty much everythnig I see about using AI is based around the construction of proper prompts to achieve the type of output you require. Could you explain how prompts are not a big part of interrfacing with AI?

Yes but you are trading off a lot of people with a one kind of disadvantage, dyslexia, for the benefit of very very few people with a motor skills disability that affects their ability to draw or manipulate an input device which is a different disadvantage. What's the acceptable ratio? One handless person enabled for every 100,000 dyslexics sidelined? Is that fair? How do you work out an acceptable tradeoff?

It is not a given that everyone can or should be enabled to do everything possible at any cost; people in wheelchairs can't be firefighters and we don't make all old subway lines fully accessible because it is incredibly expensive.

Disadvantaging a huge number of people for the benefit of very few has a societal cost.

I guess in the near future prompts can be replaced by a live editing conversation with the AI, like talking to a phantom draughtsman or a camera operator / movie team. The AI will adjust while you talk to it and can also ask questions.

ChatGPT already allows this workflow to some extent. You should try it out. I just talked to ChatGPT on my phone to test it. I think I will not go back to text for these purposes. It's much more creative to just say what you don't like about a picture.

If you speech is also affected rough sketches and other interfaces will/are also be available (see https://openart.ai/apps/sketch-to-image). What kind of expression do you prefer?

I would need to be able to talk and draw at the same time, which is how I interact with co-workers and clients.

This would be feasible. Even right now, but I am not sure how much delay is tolerable.

If you use tablets or screens, I would imagine a two screen/tablet setup, where on one screen there is a variant gallery with AI output and on the other screen there is the drawing area. The drawing constantly refreshes the gallery.

One can click on images in the gallery to move the whole image or parts of it into the drawing area. Additionally voice input leads to a conversation in the background that affects the variants as well. The process would be a mix of sketching, overpainting and voice-controlled image manipulation.

Automatic image segmentation that is automatically applied to all variants would make it easy to move objects/parts from the variants easily. The pulled parts would be stitched automatically into the drawing area, as some kind of super charged collage technique.

Maybe the variant gallery would be more like an idea board. You would say things like: "Can you make a variant with clinkers", "Please add garden furniture near the pond." etc. In the gallery these images would pop up and you can pick what you like from it.

I would imagine and hope for interfaces to exist where the natural language prompt is the initial seed and then you'd still be able to manipulate visual elements through other ways.

This is the case today. You won't get a "perfect" image without heavy post-processing, even if that post-processing is AI enhanced. ComfyUI is the new PhotoShop and although its not an easy app to understand, once it "clicks" its the most amazing piece of software to come out of the opensource oven in a long time.

Your claim that 40% of architects piqued my curiosity. I wonder if this would have an impact on the success of tools like ChatGPT in the architecture industry.

Do you have a source for this stat? I can't seem to find anything to support it.

Not sure I could fine a reference for that any more. I think I got it from an article or lecture by Richard Rogers years ago. He was a famously dyslexic architect and if I remember correctly was the patron of the British Dyslexia Association.

Terence McKenna predicted this:

“The engineers of the future will be poets.”

It’s seems exceedly clear to me that the primary interface for LLMs will voice.

>As a dyslexic I fucking hate writing essays

You can feed AI an image and ask it to describe. Kind of the inverse process.

you can speak instead if you wish. Speech to text is available for all operating systems.

Speaking has sound but that is still just words with the same logic structure. "Colours, light, shade and space" have entirely different logic.

Very interesting. Thank you for the perspective, it is extremely illuminating.

What is a user interface which can move from color, light, shade, and space to images or text? Could there be an architecture that takes blueprints and produces text or images?

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