Opinion
Generative design (image source Autodesk)
Matt Lombard wrote about his thoughts of AI and CAD at https://dezignstuff.com/cad-and-ai, which caused me to think about what he said. There is a huge gap in what so-called AI can do now, and what we wish it could do to help take over tedious tasks:
Step 1: AI is amazing!
Step 2: ???
Step 3: AI is actually useful.
As Matt noted, AI is mostly used by marketing, and AI firms are desperate to maintain their valuations by promising AGI RSN (real AI, real soon now).
I think that what CAD vendors call AI is what I would instead call "search and replace" or "most-recently used" or "rules-based" or "generative design" or "macros." These tasks require no thinking by the software, because they depend on pre-determined patterns; the thinking has been done by programmers writing the code for the algorithms.
I am ready to call it AI when software can handle problems that don't fit predetermined patterns, such as when I edit a badly-written paper that contains illogical sequences of arguments, spelling so poor the spell checker cannot figure it out, and incomplete/run-on sentences.
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