Emerging idea
Many industries are concerned about how artificial intelligence will impact their profession. But what could it mean for interior designers?
FEATURE Hugh Metcalf
Itt’simpossible to notice that AI has, seemingly all of a sudden, become a part of our everyday lives, and it’s not without its controversy. The reaction to AI’s emergence in the creative sector seems to split the camp: half viewing it as an opportunity, the other half as a threat. It’s not unfounded. We’ve already seen instances where AI design has been used to replace the need for digital artists, but whether as a exploratory idea or a cost-cutting measure it’s not so clear.
However, in design, whether architecture, product or interiors, AI hasn’t been received with the same pushback as in sectors like digital design and illustration. For example, at this year’s London Design Biennale, a collection of AI-generated, 3D printed decor pieces were displayed, designed without human input by AI ‘artist’ Ai-Da Robot.
It might be that AI isn’t perceived as such a threat to the livelihood of these designers quite yet, compared to the digital designers and illustrators that have been at the forefront of the culture wars surrounding AI. These graphic artists have found that AI text-to-image generators are pulling their images as references without permission, and that users can ask these programmes to make artwork using their style, and it still remains unclear who the copyright of artwork generated using AI belongs to.
When I reached out to Pieter Levels, the founder of Interior AI, an AI interior design image generator, this had to be my first question. ‘Interior AI runs on an AI model, which is trained on almost six billion images,’ Pieter says.
‘There is a misconception that generative AI imaging pulls images from elsewhere. Instead, it’s more like we’ve shown it billions of images which it has studied and then started to understand what interior design means, including what the different styles are, while mixing it with other disciplines as it’s not just trained on interiors, but on any type of photograph. That means it can generate designs a human might never even consider by combining clothing fashion styles with interior design, for example.
’ Interior AI is just one example of a user-friendly AI site, on which you can upload an image of your room and pick an interior design style. The generator then creates several images showing examples of your room trained on that particular style.
Using AI generators like Interior AI, there’s a clear uncanniness in the resulting images – in the ‘Interior Design’ mode, lines blur; the furniture rendered can be abstract and free form, seemingly random architectural details added and, in some instances, the design is based on what’s already in the room, just reworked into something new. I tried
