Diffusions in Architecture: Artificial Intelligence and Image Generators
by Matias del Campo, Lev Manovich
The Etiology of a New Collective Architecture
Kory Bieg
We are experiencing a rapid societal change propelled by a significant technological breakthrough — the emergence of accessible and multi‐disciplinary Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms such as diffusion‐based text‐to‐image and language generation models. Of course, this sort of disruption has happened many times before, so it is worth considering how we have reacted to change in the past, and where better to look than the earliest known photograph taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1827.25 Though a rudimentary example of photography by today's standards, it marked a new era in visual representation and had a profound impact on art — a development that was not at first well received. French painter Jean‐Auguste‐Dominique Ingres famously said, Photography is good for copying, painting is good for inventing. However, as skillful photographers began producing beautiful, critical, and conceptually sound imagery, opinions shifted. Fast forward a century, and photography had not only been embraced by many artists, it had become integral to their discipline. One of its advocates was Man Ray (1890–1976), who said, I cannot imagine modern art without photography. Photography had become the graffiti of their time. Like graffiti (and unlike painting), photography is about duplication and distribution. As Walter Benjamin observed, Technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach ...