The Second Studio Podcast: Interview with Andrew Cuddles
The Second Studio (formerly The Midnight Charette) is a podcast dedicated to design, architecture and everyday life. Organized by architects David Lee and Marina Bourderone, it features diverse creative professionals in unscripted conversations that allow for thoughtful approaches and personal discussions.
A variety of topics are covered with honesty and humor: some episodes are interviews, while others are advice for fellow designers, reviews of buildings and other projects, or casual explorations of everyday life and design. Second Studio is also available on iTunes, Spotify and YouTube.
This week, David and Marina from FAME Architecture & Design join designer and educator Andrew Cuddles, founder of Matsys, to discuss the basics of generative artificial intelligence (AI); how he teaches Midjourney; its potential role in the architectural profession; the evolving role of the architect; how students can get the most out of the tools; and more.
Highlights and timestamps
(00:00) Teaching
Students pay for education… Anyone can learn anything… You can learn almost anything on Youtube, but it’s probably not the best way to learn and it’s not a very focused way to learn. (04:14)
(05:06) Introduction to Midjourney and AI
This will take a lot of resistance… as the AI does the hard work, we just fill the space created with more work for ourselves. I hope [instead[ we take the space and go to the movies or go outside and go on a walk or whatever it is. (40:17)
It’s a huge problem that we’re going to have to deal with… [in Midjourney] there’s a model called an “aesthetic predictor” it’s basically a model that’s been trained on a bunch of images that people have rated from 0-10 [based on what is visually pleasing]. Midjourney doesn’t give you any image when you enter a prompt, but rather limits the types of images that come back to you, which are probably between 7.5-10. So it doesn’t allow you to watch any ugly images. So it’s incredibly biased towards “beautiful” often in the Western sense of what beauty is. (44:27)
(47:55) Costs of using AI tools
(54:13) Generation options
This technology is so important that we should not leave it in the hands of Microsoft, Google, Apple and Facebook, because they put their hand on the scale in different ways, as programmers determine the weights of these models of what you can and cannot do . And I don’t know that you should trust all these companies to make these decisions. (01:01:20)
(01:13:47) Teaching in the middle
The reason I think architects will continue to be valuable is that just because you can make a beautiful image doesn’t mean it’s architecture. (01:19:27)
Check out previous editions of The Second Studio Podcast.