Mikal Eckstrom of AD PRO Directory firm Studio Eckström is firmly in the no bot business. “We really strive to actually not do any renderings whatsoever unless the client mandates them, because what it’s really doing is erasing the potential for magic in the work,” says the Nebraska-based designer. When he has toyed with AI on various platforms, just for fun, Eckstrom wasn’t impressed. “We put in a simple prompt and what did we get? We got the most banal, mediocre version…. It was just like white tile on the wall. Just awful.” But he has an even larger concern. “The larger question is where’s the IP? What’s original, what’s not?”
Ridgewood, New Jersey–based designer Kerri Folb Pilchik also steers clear, much preferring physical samples to get ideas across. “I feel about 80 years old answering like this, but I’ve never used Chat GPT personally, and I’ve never used any version [of AI]…. I’m very much about being able to see the human hand.” With a rendering, she says, “You can’t really understand the feeling that the room is supposed to evoke. You don’t get the nuances of the color and the pattern and the texture.” And it takes away that incredibly crucial ‘marination’ stage. “There’s a value in things taking time and not everything being so fast.”
How will Chat GPT 4o disrupt the interior design industry (for better or for worse)?
Mencel sees Chat GPT 4o as a tool—not a competitor. Ditto Sykes. “It’s not going anywhere, so we might as well embrace it,” she says. “It can help us more efficiently and more effectively convey ideas to our clients or even to our trades.” As she puts it, “As a good designer, what it really comes down to is your creativity and your people skills…. I like to think of [AI] less as something that’s coming to take our job and more as a competitor to AutoCAD. It’s just another tool in your tool belt to put together your thoughts and express your ideas.”
Fretting about the future of AI is understandable, but the AI-designer takeover will be a while. For one thing, as a consumer, I think it may be decades before an AI designer can, say, do site visits and measurements, place a bazillion custom orders, and coordinate an install like a living and breathing decorator. Sykes also believes that what these tools can do is far from what designers do, “unless AI is creating the idea, tailoring it to their client, partnering with trades to bring it to life, coming up with who the trades are, coordinated delivery, coordinating installation, processing payments…. I mean, I think we’re a long, long way away from that.”
And there’s that human-to-human factor. In other words, if AI were to designers what Splenda is to sugar, it would similarly not delete the desire for bona fide sucrose, grown right in the earth. “To be human is to create magic, to have an error,” Eckstrom says. “Every room needs anchovies. It needs that piece of anchovy in order to pop. There’s no anchovy in Chat GPT!” Spoken like a true human.
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