A “digital twin” app creates an image of a fireworks-filled Shanghai skyline at the 5th World Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 2022.
Photographer: Wang Gang/VCG via Getty Images
What It Looks Like When AI Designs a City
Generative design tools powered by artificial intelligence stand to transform how architects and planners do their jobs, and how residents see urban problems.
When designers laboring away on a virtual cityscape began observing and tweaking their creation, one of the first things that jumped out at them, when they scanned down boulevards or looked across main streets, was the trees. More aptly, it was the unsettling lack of tree cover.
The streets of InfiniCity, a model 3D city synthesis built using AI that was released earlier this year, can appear a bit like a crude crayon-on-cardboard metropolis. The project renders an unending artificial city via a multi-step process; a series of software programs work together, pulling in satellite data and using other design tools and algorithms to create a streetscape users can endlessly cruise. Co-developer Chieh Hubert Lin says the goal is to “automatically recreate lifelike real-world cities,” generated entirely from the imagination of a synthetic mind.