Plumbing

A Man Made an AI-Generated Design Agency in One Weekend — Take a Look

An AI generated image of a living room. Alex Cornell / Andever

  • Alex Cornell, an interface designer, founded a fake design company using AI tools in a weekend.
  • Cornell said he used OpenAI’s GPT-4 and AI art tool Midjourney for the project.
  • Some Twitter users thought the company was real, despite the fundamental flaws in the images.

Alex Cornell, an interface designer, started a fictional design company in a weekend using generative AI tools.

Design firm Andever Design Partners was so compelling that some Twitter users assumed it was real.

A kitchen in one of Alex Cornell’s AI-generated homes. Alex Cornell / Andever

“Some people thought it was a real deal,” Cornell told Insider. “They asked me how I would get customers and what happens if I have to buy furniture.”

Cornell, who used Midjourney and ChatGPT for the project, said it’s a way to try and understand the tools for future work projects.

“I think some people misunderstood my intention,” he said. “I got really good at it very quickly just because I had such a specific goal that made it really easy for me to learn how to improve.”

He said the entire project took a weekend, which “just shows how easy it is”.

“The prevailing opinion was basically a kind of surprise that these tools are as good as they are. No one was impressed with me, we’re all generally impressed with the tools,” he said.

The design company looked real

Cornell said Midjourney, a generative AI art tool, is so easy to use that no training is required.

“If you go online, you’re going to see a lot of people with video tutorials and tweet threads and all this stuff telling you how to get good at giving prompts,” he said. “It becomes clear very quickly that all these tutorials are useless – it’s so easy to use that you could just write ‘cool bathroom’ and you’d have a usable image.”

A bathroom created with the AI ​​art tool Midjourney. Alex Cornell / Andever

However, Cornell has discovered a few tricks to ensure consistency.

“If it’s about a specific competency, it’s about figuring out how to create consistent residents,” he said, adding that using the same adjectives in prompts helps.

“Minimal was important,” he said. “Concrete was one that I used a lot.”

A bedroom created with AI tools. Alex Cornell / Andever

He said it’s important to have the same prompt for the background so the views out of the windows stay the same.

“For the house on Lake Tahoe, as long as every room has a view of a lake, most people wouldn’t really consider it,” he said.

“I found it very difficult to draw a specific urban city out of the window, for example an apartment in San Francisco is difficult, but if you just give an urban apartment you can’t tell where it is,” he said.

Cornell also created a website for the design firm. He used OpenAI’s GPT-4 to write company history, create employee biographies and suggest some inspiration for midjourney.

AI still has fundamental problems

AI image generators have fundamental flaws.

The tools have great difficulty in simulating human hands and can sometimes produce images with a plastic look.

Cornell said the problems are a little different when creating interiors.

He said: “I’m starting to realize that you probably shouldn’t have lighting or fixtures of any kind like faucets – if you look closely you can see they’re really distorted.”

“Lighting or fixtures of any kind like faucets — they’re really distorted if you look closely,” Cornell said. Alex Cornell / Andever

“Chair legs and table legs, if you look closely, they often kind of merge together, so that the table leg is also the leg of a chair.”

He also said that the bot is much better at creating toilets when prompted with the phrase “toilet”.

Cornell said it was difficult to fix the small imperfections. Alex Cornell / Andever

“Sometimes the toilet was next to the bathtub. The ingredients were all right, but not positioned correctly,” he said.

Cornell said it was frustratingly difficult to correct the small imperfections, even though the overall images are impressive.

“You’re trying to capture the whole picture,” he said, “and you just get a little lost in the details.”

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