AI Practice Day
New skills for a new world
17 February 2025
Here’s the thing with artificial intelligence: We talk a lot about how ineffective it would be to push back against the AI wave, and how there’s simply no point in adopting an attitude of hesitance. After all, nobody stopped the internet from bedding into every cell of day-to-day life. But we seldom talk about how complementary a bit of hesitance can be to our overriding excitement about AI.
The truth is, at Ayre Chamberlain Gaunt, we don’t know where AI will take us or exactly how our relationship with it will develop. But with prudence and awareness, we feel it’s a journey we’d rather begin now. As American author Zig Zigler said, ‘you don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great’.
‘You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.’ — Zig Zigler
We had an excellent day on Friday all together as a practice, delivered by Keir Regan-Alexander from Arka Works. Keir guided us through workshops on the two big hitters of the AI world: text and images.
Beginning with large language models, we learned some initial tips on how to break down instructions to AI and ultimately get the best out of it. It was particularly interesting gauging the significance of context. How do you feed AI models correctly? For us, responses can vary so much depending on our use of context. So often crucial; sometimes not.
We later moved on to lessons in visual AI, where the word ‘refine’ was just as pertinent as in text. It almost became our word of the day, capturing the entire art of navigating AI. And as relatively unseasoned jockeys of artificial intelligence, we’re ever learning about the refining process.
We will forever live in the visual world as an architectural practice, so our fascination towards Keir’s image AI workshop was to be expected. Both image generation and image interpretation are functions of AI we look forward to harnessing going forward. Our team were notably impressed by the combination of raw and stylised renders generated, opening up potential avenues for enhanced client communication through high-speed visualisation.
With so many exciting takeaways from our practice day, the challenge now is balancing this with a healthy awareness. Can we determine clear guardrails and procedures to ensure safe and beneficial integration into our work? That’s how to maximise the utility of AI.