March 24, 2025
Foresight notes for creative AI adoption
By the end of this article, you’ll know exactly how to balance AI-generated realism and creative exploration, ensuring your projects remain innovative and client-friendly.
Listen to Article (AI-generated Bruno)
Artistic Vision in Architecture
An architect friend of mine once told me, “Never make a render too real. It’s an easy sell to clients, but it compromises the reality of the project.” Contrary to believers of the never-ending promises of AI, I believe these tools are just good enough to generate final outcomes. Already baked renders for the architect to take out of the oven and present to the client.
But what’s the use of it? If, as my friend said, photorealistic renders aren’t better? What’s worth a model trained on thousands of architectural images if it won’t produce an image that gives us as much leeway for creativity and interpretation as a handcrafted one? Let alone a sketch.
What’s worth a hyper-real image that sorts out all technical aspects of portrayal, obfuscating the nudeness of a drawing that liberates from all detail, exposing the silhouette of an idea?
So what is worth an AI model if it commonly forces architectural sketches to achieve realism? How can an architect, let alone a whole firm, use these increasingly popular technologies without compromising their creative control?
Strategic Foresight: Preparing for AI Adoption Without Losing Artistic Control
The more you think about the tool, the less you think about what the tool is for—and AI is no exception.
Due to its unique speed of development, it’s not only excitement or an interest, but a confusion in what to adopt, how to adopt it, and when. As any tool, AI looked at from afar—just as a hammer—is made and good for one task, at least in the creative field.
AI is a tool that excels, better than any human, at analyzing given data—inputs such as text, audio, video, image, 3D models, etc.—and structuring information to create high-quality outputs: text, audio, video, image, 3D models, etc.
But in the creative context of AI, high quality doesn’t mean a product of quality. In other words, a good product.
As mentioned before, AI images, videos, writing, etc. can easily pass as real or of professional quality. But as long as there’s not a human involved, there isn’t real creativity. That’s not design. That’s not real design. That’s not a good product.
Now, this doesn’t pretend to argue against the use of AI, nor that its level of output isn’t and would never be worthy of a professional. Quite the contrary—there’s already a vast amount of finished products that have minimal or even no work on their output, selected by a professional and successfully approved by the client.
The point is that strategic foresight means understanding the core nature and functionality of this technology to see where it’s headed and adopt it in a meaningful way—not caring what tool is in use particularly, but how it’s used with your own personal workflow.
Not to enhance our creativity—which by essence is only affected by ourselves—but to liberate the abstract, subjective, creative flow from the factual, objective constraints that facts and data embody or represent on our memory.
Our brain isn’t built for gathering facts. It’s uniquely designed to interpret information and generate opinions—both factors crucial, and the foundations of creativity, and what makes each professional creative unique.
Turns out AI can replicate—but on the other hand, it is the perfect tool for data analysis and fact recall, spitting out outputs faster and with higher quality than humans. Ergo: a hyper-realistic architectural rendering.
Fearing AI makes us obsolete confuses creativity with fact recall.
“Strategic foresight is a disciplined approach to define where to play, how to bring value, and how to ensure team resiliency throughout the lens of unforeseen disruption.”
- (Extract from the Future Today Institute deck at SXSW 2024)
Last Words to Veterans of Design
• Lucky. You have the upper hand.
• New generations were tech natives. Tech constraints, interfaces, pipelines were natural to us.
• These tools—with their unique interface, often single input (e.g. text prompt bar)—appeal to a more natural interaction.
• Free of the need to know how to work around tools and features.
• Calling out the ability to describe an idea, use creative judgment, and manipulate it if needed.
• These are things learned from experience—giving older generations an edge over newer ones.