Beyond Prompts: Analogy-enhanced generative AI tools for Urban Design

Team: Randall Davis (PI), MIT Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering; Takehiko Nagakura, MIT Associate Professor in Architecture; and Rohit Sanatani, LCAU Ph.D Candidate

Summary: State-of-the-art Generative AI models for design are limited by the conventional representations (i.e. stereotypes) of environments that they learn from their training data. They are often unable to respond to the diverse and subjective nature of design creativity. In many cases, outputs of prompt-based tools fail to capture the qualitative ‘essence’ of a design in the mind of a designer, even when presented with carefully crafted descriptive prompts.  

 “This project will help us tackle the hard problems of subjectivity in design and to develop tools with analogical reasoning capabilities. Such tools have the potential to understand and respond to subjectivity in ways that have not been possible so far.”