AI ChatGPT and VW

[Helm]

What do you think?  How will AI be used in architecture in general and are there possible ways that it may be integrated into VW or how we use VW.  I have found that it can be useful in looking up code issues on just about any subject.  The problem being that it is not updated past 2021 but at least it is a starting point.  Can it be used to do repetitive tasks of any sort for example.  

[P Retondo]

Question submitted by ChatGPT!

[Pat Stanford]

I have seen several attempts to have ChatGPT or similar write Vectorscript or Python. All have failed miserably with the AI making up functions that don't actually exists in the languages.

 

I am not certain there is enough sample code for VW scripting or good enough documentation of scripting to allow and AI to properly train to write scripts. So automation of VW via AI will be limited.

[Jeff Prince]

8 hours ago, Helm said:

How will AI be used in architecture in general

 

To reduce labor costs and squeeze more production out of fewer people.

To make commodity architecture even more boring than what CAD and Sketchup has done (rectilinear boxes within intersecting volumes anyone).

To create a new generation of architects who are even further removed from understanding the importance and effort needed to create great spaces.

To manifest more complicated forms of Pop Architecture that will serve to frustrate contractors who have to build it.

To create some of the most amazing and emotional connected spaces ever built.

 

It's a tool, it's a technology.

Like any, it will be used for good and evil, profit and enlightenment, simplification and complication, creation and destruction.

I think the negatives will far out weight the positives though seeing how society generally seems to appreciate commodity over creativity.

 

[SEStone]

Yep,

I just spent 5 hours playing around with it.

Started to produce a custom window schedule, ended up trying to produce a simple blue cube...still nothing.

I think it's only a matter of time before it becomes a reality (months? not years)

I'm excited for it's potential.

[zoomer]

https://archinect.com/news/article/150348101/introducing-the-archinect-in-depth-artificial-intelligence-series

 

[Helm]

I suppose the initial uses will be more along the lines of research, writing and help with understanding various issues.  Maybe in using Excel for example as it can explain or even creat formulas for cells.  It can create work schedules, and research product suppliers.  There are a lot of uses before it starts designing buildings. 

[Jeff Prince]

16 minutes ago, Helm said:

There are a lot of uses before it starts designing buildings. 

Very true.  A few months ago I used it to write some marketing copy.  I shared my version and the AI version with some colleagues in a blind taste test… they could not identify which was which.  I spent over an hour writing mine, AI took less than a minute.

 

The scary thing was I asked ChatGPT to “write a travelogue along historic Route 66 from Albuquerque to Flagstaff”.  The result was striking as a human experience, referencing the character of the drive including the weather, specific landscape features and stops along the way.  Writers are certainly being impacted like how newspapers and journalism are nearly dead due to the internet.

[jpccrodrigues]

18 hours ago, SEStone said:

Yep,

I just spent 5 hours playing around with it.

Started to produce a custom window schedule, ended up trying to produce a simple blue cube...still nothing.

I think it's only a matter of time before it becomes a reality (months? not years)

I'm excited for it's potential.

Same experience. Phyton script to lay a drop emitter for each plant (a very common request in the forum...). Never worked... Anybody tried to create a Marrionette script? Just curious to see if works or not.

[Helm]

Do you remember the VW tool for creating a matrix and then using it to maximize a floor plan layout.  That's what we are talking about here on steroids.  AI works well when you feed it the information and ask it to minipulate it.  I would love to be able to test any new tools that VW is thinking about using AI to do them.  Right now I think it could do the floor plan matrix but also add in more info like which rooms need more natural light, where is the best view, do the clients for a house want a small or a large kitchen, etc.  

 

I also did some travel stuff with it.  I asked if for a route connecting several cities that worked well.  I fed in an excell list of destinations and dates of arrival and it wrote up a littel program.  I aksed it to list the time and distance between each city, no problem.

 

I asked it to give a history of a local historical building and it gave a bunch of incorrect info, so it's not there yet.  But when I told it that it was wrong it did mostly correct itself.  

[twk]

AI has been a catchphrase for chatGPT, but really AI is way more broad than only chatGPT.
chatGPT is a Large Language Model, at its simplest, it is a text prediction bot on steroids. Its been trained on almost every datapoint on the internet to learn when a person asks one thing in a text prompt, and try and figure out what are they really asking for.
Artificial Intelligence has a plethora of subfields> computer vision, natural language processing, machine learning, deep learning, diffusion models and more, and the GPT model is one of them.
(*chatGPT is just one GPT model owned by openAI, and now closed-source. There are many open-source models out there trying to compete with openAI)

With regards to chatGPT, I have been using it extensivley as a 'co-pilot' in writing python scripts and code (you can search my posts for examples). As it is in itself a type of language, you have to coorece it in certain ways to give you the type of answer you're looking for, but most of the time it does get it right; and the other times, well... funnily-drastically-wrong.
The rule is: don't trust it, and always double check what it spits out.
But for coding it has been amazing, as it can actually analyse your code in milliseconds, and rewrite it to use better coroutines and code structures. I have also been using it to explain code back to me. The marionette nodes have their codes accesible, and you can copy and paste the code into chatGPT and ask it to explain to you, the code-flow or code logic, to see why the VW engineers did what they did under the hood, and then use that explanation to refine the nodes to do what you want it to do, or even ask it to fine tune or rewrite code more efficiently.

As for building codes and regulations, it is also a perfect use case. Another colleague of mine has been using it to interpret legal jargon for building code clauses into easier to understand layman terms. And that is using it for what it was built for. Not for redesiging buildings. But there are offshoots of this particular AI field (GPT), that is more fascinating (look up autoGPT, miniture bots that create tasks for itself to solve, that are actaully aimed at solving a bigger initial task). And these can be used for anything from writing a shopping list from a menu with up-to-date prices to gathering case studies for a legal case.

The thing I am most concerned about these technologies and the hype surrounding them is the pace at which this thing is moving. I don't think any of us are ready for whats coming. It will touch every aspect of society. Even those who created, developed and funded these things can't explain why it does some of the things it does, some even going as far as to say to put a haitus on its development. 

At the end of the day, these technologies and any technology is a tool. A hammer on its own is useless, in the hand of a builder, it can be used to build things, in the hands of a demolition guy, it can be used to destroy things. I don't think it will lead to more mundane buildings/spaces, those who know how to use it will build great things, and those who don't will build not-so-great things.

[Jeff Prince]

 

[RGyori]

To date I have not used AI other than in the form of specific functions baked into some of my photo apps...(producing some interesting if not anticipated results). With this said there will be interesting Architectural uses developed in the (near?) future that will open up some useful and likely unexpected possibilities.

 

An idle and perhaps naive thought regarding ChatGPT: What happens once human writers have been relegated to the fringes and ChatGTP is left to mine the works of earlier ChatGTP work that in turn was mined from earlier ChatGPT work... and so on down the rabbit hole? An iterative process in reverse producing nonsense or the great cosmic truth? 

[Helm]

Have a read of this:  https://architosh.com/2023/05/amy-bunszel-of-autodesk-talks-to-architosh-about-forma/ 

[KIT KOLLMEYER]

Check this out: https://www.evolvelab.io/glyph and this: https://www.swapp.ai

AI documentation tools integrated into Vectorworks would be very powerful. We could all spend more time on design.

[Helm]

19 hours ago, KIT KOLLMEYER said:

Check this out: https://www.evolvelab.io/glyph and this: https://www.swapp.ai

AI documentation tools integrated into Vectorworks would be very powerful. We could all spend more time on design.

Wow, swapp is the scary one, they don't put a lot of info on the web site.  It will be interesting to follow.  

[Jeremy Best]

On 5/6/2023 at 5:01 AM, jeff prince said:

society generally seems to appreciate commodity over creativity.

 

I love this reflection and it rings true to me. So much of the AI generated art I've seen looks great but denotes the shallow thinking gone into it. Everyone takes photos, but few know how to produce beautiful, evocative and meaningful compositions. Perhaps, given the nature of this tool, it will enable average designers and profit-focussed developers to produce designs that are also beautiful, sympathetic and harmonious. The best [practitioners] in any field will always be a minority, so they can continue to lead the way, while providing new and better examples to feed the AI with which hopefully will elevate life for all concerned. 🤞 - But I suspect this is all only relevant in the short-term, because some are expecting super-intelligence to emerge within the next 10 years and for which there might be no comparison. 

[Jeremy Best]

On 5/6/2023 at 4:23 AM, Pat Stanford said:

I have seen several attempts to have ChatGPT or similar write Vectorscript or Python. All have failed miserably with the AI making up functions that don't actually exists in the languages.

 

@twk Tui, I've been trying to achieve things in VectorScript that are beyond my extremely limited know-how. (I understand programming concepts, but lack experience with the syntax and functions to construct anything even moderately simple). Like Pat mentioned, I too have experienced ChatGPT making up VectorScript functions so it's probably cost me more time than a studious approach. I'd expect the same thing to occur when scripting with Python in Vectorworks and that Marionette coding would be subject to the same problems, so I'm keen to know how you have been achieving such success? I might move to using Python in my scripts if it is indeed that much better at composing useable code. 

[twk]

1 hour ago, Jeremy Best said:

 

@twk Tui, I've been trying to achieve things in VectorScript that are beyond my extremely limited know-how. (I understand programming concepts, but lack experience with the syntax and functions to construct anything even moderately simple). Like Pat mentioned, I too have experienced ChatGPT making up VectorScript functions so it's probably cost me more time than a studious approach. I'd expect the same thing to occur when scripting with Python in Vectorworks and that Marionette coding would be subject to the same problems, so I'm keen to know how you have been achieving such success? I might move to using Python in my scripts if it is indeed that much better at composing useable code. 

 

Maybe my post made it sound like I am using chatGPT to write full working code. If so, apologies, that is not what I meant. 
Your findings, and Pat's is the expected behaviour. chatGPT should NOT be used or trusted to write 'working code'. I think if this is established before embarking on its use, then it will be of better service.
"We" still need to know the syntax for the programming language, be it Vectorscript or Python.

 

The 'success' I explain is more so with me finally understanding key concepts of areas of python, vectorscript, marionette python and just general maths and computer science in general. 
For example I take the wonderfully written vectorscipt code by @_c_ on Listbrowsers at https://developer.vectorworks.net/index.php/User:CBM-c-/Dialog_with_List_Browser

I take that vectorscript code, and I ask chatGPT to explain it to me, and portion by portion. What each function does, why its positioned where its, can it be improved, etc.

 

I then take that knowledge and write my own python code, based on the logic explained to me by the LLM. So there's still required knowledge of python and vectorworks, and vectorworks' api calls etc. But now, I have this ready-to-go tutor to help me along the way. And this has saved me countless hours of searching on the internet, and forums. And this goes for Marionette nodes as well, I explained in a previous post about the divide nurbs node in the marionette library. I opened up the node, copied the code, ran it through chatGPT to explain to me why this was done this way, and implemented my own code for doing the same function, but on a polyline or polygon. This knowledge actually led me to now trying to understand vectors, and vectors in maths and computer science etc. Which I am a novice in, I hated maths in high school, and here I am enjoying the learning journey some 15 years later.

So, can it achieve things in vectorscipt or python in vectorworks, short answer yes. How? As a learning tool, not a functional script writer.

 

Edited May 25, 2023 by twk

[Christiaan]

I see that ChatGPT now supports plugins. None of which assist with writing any code that I can see.

[Jeremy Best]

On 5/25/2023 at 5:05 PM, Christiaan said:

I see that ChatGPT now supports plugins

 

I still haven't been granted access yet 😭

[twk]

lol

 

[ZaCH Ciaburri]

It could really expedite the drafting of certain entertainment situations. Imagine being able to just say 3x truss width of stage, 10 wash, 7 profile, 6 strobe per truss, fixture numbers grouped in unique 100's. And then it just populates your rig, you dictate to adjust its height and some spacing and then export it into eos offline and you are programming a show in minutes. Obviously this is overly simplified but speech to light plot drafting sounds amazing.

[halfcoupler]

 

[Helm]

I would love to use the new AI feature but it is only for service select customers and I can't add it to my current version.  Oh well.