AI Article in Grauniad the other day which may be of interest … not sure why its highlighting Musk though or whether it should.
There’s also a link in the article to GPT4 - that article has a comment about Duolingo -
““Artificial intelligence has always been a huge part of our strategy,” said Duolingo’s principal product manager, Edwin Bodge. “We had been using it for personalizing lessons and running Duolingo English tests. But there were gaps in a learner’s journey that we wanted to fill: conversation practice, and contextual feedback on mistakes.” The company’s experiments with GPT-4 convinced it that the technology was capable of providing those features, with “95%” of the prototype created within a day.”
Interesting article. A topical concern at the eleventh hour.
Don’t worry! No, I don’t think AI will entirely replace architects but AI may well replace a lot of the human donkey work in the architectural field. Such as designing public lavatories and the like.
What will happen is that the profession will need to refocus it’s skills to where the human is irreplaceable. AI can produce, or rather hybrid reproduce designs but architects can better determine how the human interplay will function. Designs need to be both create able in terms of cost, composition and longevity but also appropriate and pleasing to the human users. AI will not be able to envisage fundamental human feelings. Or, not yet anyway.
Here is an example of why a (gifted) human brain will still be needed
There will be room for both. Machine made design and human (hand) made. Just as there already is throughout the world of commodities. But just as in manufacturing, low level architectural jobs may be replaced by machine AI. Mediocre architects had best retrain elsewhere because only the more gifted humans will still be needed.
As indeed in many professions. Including journalism
This very late arrival at the thread found your little experiment an interesting project with an uninteresting yet thought provoking result.
The anodyne style and clichéd descriptions give me hope for human creativity. Is it possible for a piece of AI generated fiction to be anything other than banal? Even if one added a filter to your brief such as ‘… in the style of Hunter S Thompson’ the result could only be a parody.
This chain of thought put me in mind of Raymond Queaneau’s Exercises in Style, where the same short story is told in 99 different literary styles - you can read most of them at the bottom of its Wikip entry:-
Reassuring that though the style has changed, the writing remains as clichéd as the first story. Nevertheless I was previously unaware that ‘farming tradition’ had a weathering effect on buildings …
All things considered, and not wanting to be on the luddite bandwagon, I’d think AI is another tool, as CAD, for the thinkers to use.
Bernstein argues that even the best AIs are still nowhere near the competence of a qualified architect.
“I happen to think that what we do as architects is pretty complicated,” he said. “At it’s best, it’s about managing a complex, multi-variable problem and making a series of ambiguous judgements that require trade-offs, and I don’t believe we will get to a model that can do even 10 per cent of that in the foreseeable future.”
“If we’re not even at the point where a car can drive itself, I think we’re a long way from the point where an algorithm can be a professional architect,” he continued.
I do a daily diary - 2021 to 2024 - all in one Word document file which unfortunately became corrupted. Right clicking on this corrupted file enabled an earlier copy to be found from Windows 10 File History but which didn’t include the last 56 days. Memory and other sources will have to find what was written on some of those days. So be it!
Text retrieval of corrupted data from various websites didn’t work.
I want some easy way of saving to my hard disk and at the same time to a safe place like a cloud storage website or to a separate external hard disk, so that this problem doesn’t happen again.
I already have Microsoft’s One-Drive but uploading my daily diary to this cloud storage site takes ages! I wanted something instantaneous. Google Drive uploaded all 266 x A4 pages & 65,000 words of my diary instantaneously.
I now save a daily diary entry in the usual way, and immediately after do a save-as to Google Drive. It works.
So, first thing - what sort of save interval do you have in your word options?
If the location of the file is already on onedrive, then the saves should be automatically uploaded to onedrive (in fact, usually, it’s only the changes, so pretty quick). If the location of the file is on a folder in your hardrive, then yes, it can take some time to upload.
I feel happier with a copy on both my hard disk and on cloud storage, although that means saving, then saving as – 2 operations.
But I can see how an instantaneous save to One-Drive only could be more satisfying. I might try doing as you suggest, using MS One-Drive, for a trial period – see how I feel about it.
I don’t know if I’d say it’s better, but you could use rclone to automate the uploading of the file to One Drive.
It can periodically check if the version of file(s) in a directory on your local machine is/are different to the version in One Drive (or any of the other online storage services it supports), and upload it automatically for you if so.
It’s a very handy tool, but it’s not the most user-friendly… have a read of the User Guide here
There is also a GUI so you don’t have to faff about with command line stuff if you don’t want to - GUI
It’s only as reliable as the vendor. I think if you go with the big boys such as Microsoft, Google, Dropbox, etc… then you’ll be fine because there’s usually a fee involved so you’re entering into a commercial contract. You can get free packages with companies such as BackBlaze and Mega (both of which I use but not for stuff I absolutely couldn’t live without)
I moved from Dropbox about 6 years ago and haven’t looked back.
“My Documents” are now the local copy of OneDrive - this in effect means you have a copy on your hard disk which synchronised with the cloud copy - it also gives you many restore points in the event of a problem.
I keep everything on OneDrive: I no longer have local copies of anything.
Of course, it requires an internet connection* when I edit or create a document, and it’s slightly slower via a VPN, but it suits me.
It’s a bit fiddly to set up in Windows (though AskLeo has a useful tutorial, eg https://askleo.com/the-problem-with-onedrive-backup/) - you have to make sure your Documents, Desktop and (I think) Pictures folders are actually those in OneDrive, but once done it’s fine.
I’m now using it wirth a Mac. I just keep everything on the OneDrive “website” and edit from there.
If I have anything really important, I copy it to Google Drive. If I had lots of important stuff, I’d create different Google accounts, because with each one you get 5Go of storage. Or you could use Apple, but it costs.
*If there’s a problem with the internet connection, then it saves the document locally until it can upload it.
I wouldn’t be able to read my handwriting! Long gone are the days I write anything by hand. Signing the occasional cheque is about my limit, and I don’t send birthday or Christmas cards any more. Do that by email or use Jacquie Lawson ecards. And letters are written using a handwriting style font.
