Rhino Red Prints Blog
AI in Design Drawings
Jun
Artificial Intelligence or AI in Design and Drawings is a challenge not much less than any other implementation of AI elsewhere. People are fascinated by it, scared of it or just plain ignorant about it. But it is almost here. Not just in the movies, with robots turning on people. Actually here. It is in its simplest form at this point, but things move quickly in the realm of computer science and this is the hottest topic on the news in the last decade.
In Design Drawings AI is present to an extent, where you can take a drawing and make a computer work on it for you, squeezing the info embedded in the file and work over it to improve it. That goes for vectors or raster files all together. It also saves time and energy. AI does not need rest, coffee, social interactions. It needs power from the main. You plug it in, turn it on and just give it a job. Then its sole purpose is to do it. When designing an artefact in its initial form, it is in 2 or 3D and on a file. There are software solutions that help people work on it. But lately, there are experiments for something that goes even further. It can do work from scratch.
So far, in certain software programs, there is the option for one to put in an image and get the measurements out. Or put a drawing and the software could re-write it in different format by itself. Improve it, change it, alter it. However, what software engineers are aiming at is at another level. The end goal is to put a missing link – for example a part – and give the AI the option to compute the need for the part, its dimensions and its materials. That include drawings being made and re-made in the background, without any human participation. Once it fits the description in the task, the AI presents it back to us.
3D printing for example, does a job that you need hours for: it takes a file with a drawing and turns it into an object. If this was done by hand, it would’ve take times the hours needed from the computer. But AI is capable of much more. It has the potential to create the initial file itself. We are only at the door of a castle of possibilities here. And once we enter, there will be no turning back. Drawings can not only be improved, they can be drawn from scratch by the AI, only if you put your request properly. Because AI – at this point – is designed to serve us.
Aside from the scary expectations and fiction on the TV where AI will destroy us in the end – AI can and should be limited. Limited to a task or a pack of cumulative tasks, that it can take and work on flawlessly. That would be its best purpose. And when we are talking drawings, imagine hours and hours of work being done in the background, just because the algorithm “understands” the needs that you have.
We might not be far from a point where not only the AI would be able to draw a blueprint from scratch, but probably at a level when the software itself will be able to extract a blueprints just from couple of pictures you feed it. Even though we are not there yet, a lot of efforts are put into this. Design and drawings will be among the first who will get direct benefit of the new technology. Hopefully, it will not only help the evolution process, but it will alter it indefinitely.