Hey Barry Kelly!
Thanks, i do think that you have good points here, but you have to approch this technology a bitt differently (for now at least). Almost everybody on the market who provides generative AI based, image generation services on buildings (in the AEC sector) markets this solution as "rendering". However we market this solution as what it is capable right now: Inspiration, as AI is not capable of rendering right now.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) has no idea what they are generating. They have no context about your goals, your motivations, basically what you want. To make things worse the generator is only just one part of the equation, the other part is the Language Model that trained to understand our natural language, which also has no context, or any understanding, but only tries to translate our words to numbers that can recall a certain pattern from the generative model. And there are the last part, Us and how we could vocalise our goals, and needs. If you talk to another person who is way more intelligent then a GAN AI, and way more capable to understand you, sometimes another person cannot understand what we want, because we are not 100% in vocalising our thoughts.
When it comes to AI its even worse, and this domain is called "prompt engineering", or to figure out how a certain AI best understands us.
From that AI Visualizer (Stable Diffusion and its custom components) won't create perfect results. It's going to create something, that tries to resamble your needs. Sometimes its good (based on a "lucky seed" and your prompting, etc.) and sometimes it's bad. But right now the goal is not perfect results. the goal is good enough results to inspire you.
Sure you could focus on the mistakes, like small doors, gaps, inconsistancies like there are no access to a platform, but you could also focus on what can you get out of an AI generated idea that inspire you. What about the surfaces, the whole "vibe" of the generated scene, the additional parts that just generated onto the building? If the generated image not 100% precise, and makes sense, you really cannot take any inspirations, ideas from it?
So Yes! Based on what I said above I do think they are really good results. They are does not makes sense architecturally on a lots of parts, they have artifacts, but they have a lots of inspirative parts too, that can give you ideas, concepts to think about, and can give a general idea how an idea would roughly look like visually.
However AI technology is developing like no other. Soon we going to have less artifacts on the images, way faster generation times (like GANs will generate in real time, as we moved from static rendering to real time rendering), and will understands us more precisely. We going to have the opportunity to finetune GANs to have more context, understanding of architecture, etc.
So we going to have better and better results in the future, but right now we have this, which I really do think is amaznig. We can generate, not 100% perfect, but I think good enought building concepts from 2-3 grey blocks, that can give us ideas, inspiration for further design, in like 30-60 seconds (or 5 seconds on very fast machines...).
