AI and design: valuable aid or risk?

Artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly influences choices and behaviour by suggesting music, films, friends on social media, in short by directing our decisions. Companies have a great interest in contributing to heritage studies through their artificial intelligence systems. The construction industry is slowly and steadily evolving by embracing new technologies such as Digital Twin (DT), Building Information Modelling (BIM), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Vision (SV) to further improve the efficiency, productivity, accuracy and safety of built environments. Architectural creation is always affected by the development of technology and available resources, and the presence of computation and the advent of artificial intelligence opens up new perspectives in architectural design, which is not only embodied in the application of the new medium but is also present in the new design logic. Recent AI art platforms can create impressive images from simple text descriptions. This makes them powerful tools for design in any discipline that requires creativity. This also applies to the early stages of architectural design with multiple stages of conception, sketching and modelling. This article presents a critical review of what has been done in the field of applying AI in architectural design.