Ep. 69 AI and Beauty | Passion for Craft Podcast 

Thanks for this platform

Really fun episode. One thing to mention is that Dall-E and ChatGPT are general purpose AI tools. They aren't "experts" in any particular area, so that is one reason why you guys got wonky results. Additionally, prompt engineering is still in its infancy and these models can be really temperamental in how they're prompted. You guys started to figure some of the needed prompt adjustments during the episode. My wife and I recently had a dining room table made and the guy who made it used AI tooling to iterate on designs and it was a really neat experience. Some of the designs were awful, but overall, the AI generated ideas were helpful and the end result was better due to it. I don't know if an architecture focused AI exists yet, but it would be cool to train a LLM based on Brent's knowledge and expertise. It would be neat to see the results.

The best video yet I think it really gets to the root of what Real craftsmanship is

Another excellent one ❤

Most interesting. The problem with the argument that there is a “correct” approach to creating beauty is that it is reductive. When you do this, you see everything as lacking some aspect that would make it more beautiful, rather than seeing the truth in front of you. In my craft, proportion and historical detail are king and queen, and combining them harmoniously while at the same time providing for the needs of the play will make for beauty. Am I always successful? Well… that’s a different discussion.

This producer rivals young jamie from rogan

Guys, for the entire run of this podcast you have danced around, without actually touching on or referencing, the work of Christopher Alexander. He was an Austrian-born British-American architect and design theorist. There is too much to say about this man and his work to fit into a RU-vid comment--please look him up. A discussion of Alexander and his pattern language merits at least an episode of this podcast. I will leave an Alexander quote that can be found in his Wikipedia page: "There is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way. It is not possible to make great buildings, or great towns, beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way. And, as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form, as the trees and hills, and as our faces are." Source: "The Timeless Way of Building" (1979)

the AI images are more cartoonish, the issue is what the images are based on and the poor images that were put in to the IA to "train" the output. To Bren's point we have to learn what good is, think a child's drawing vs a architects rendering. there is a finish and polish that happens, but also knowing proportion and building best vs building cheep and fake fancy.

🤺🙏

One of the first lessons they tried to teach us in architecture school was that there is no single "correct" solution. While I agree with your choice to follow classic teachings, it is no more valid than someone who would promote a modernist approach, or some other approach.

Mathematics is an objective truth. All life on earth could cease to exist and the conceptual fact of 2+2=4 would still be so and the next civilization that developed from starfish would still find it to be true, though they would not use the same language to describe it. Proportion is mathematical but beauty is subjective, based in principles universal to humans (and some to most mammals) but still the appreciation of proportions and symmetry and texture reside in the frontal and prefrontal cortex. Starfish people would find very different things to be beautiful than humans do. What we think of as correct in building as defined by Vitruvius is a reflection of human attraction and inclinations,zebras would build very different structures, but they are relatively universal across humans, just as are facial expressions and reflexes. The trouble with modern architecture and art is that not all creation, buildings or music are meant to be beautiful because there are other valuable emotions and experiences. Wright deliberately designed spaces to create feelings of compression or claustrophobia, brutalists to invoke unease or discomfort. They were tired of beauty. McMansions are just meant to invoke envy of size and wealth, if anyone thought about them at all.

it should be set in stone: nobody likes macmansions! Does the high construction and material cost ensure that the house will be aesthetically pleasing, is the price equal to the beauty? No one buys a macmansion at the starting price. Al does almost the same thing as an architect's drawing on paper, unrealistic solutions still seem interesting on paper, but in reality they are often impractical, clumsy and the final solutions seem to be missing. Does beauty also have to be practical etc 🤔😶