The National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) has announced a consensus opinion regarding the regulation of artificial intelligence technology and its future impact on the architectural profession.
This announcement emerged from NCARB's 2024 Annual Business Meeting in June, where 150 licensing board members convened. The meeting built on earlier discussions held during the March 2024 Regional Summit and the inaugural Futures Symposium in December 2023, which explored AI's impact on the profession. NCARB stated, "Going forward, NCARB will continue to monitor the expanding use of AI across practice and its potential interface with the regulatory mission of NCARB and its members. NCARB remains committed to collaborating with its licensing board members to ensure the best interests of the public are served through the effective and reasonable regulation of architectural practice."
NCARB emphasized that while advancements in AI and computational design are providing architects with new labor-saving tools, it is essential that architects maintain responsibility and accountability. They noted that AI is a tool, not a replacement for professional judgment, and that regardless of the AI tools used, it remains the architect's duty to conform to the standard of care and remain in responsible control of all technical submissions under their seal.
The organization also highlighted key points of consensus from their regulatory community:
In addition, NCARB plans to explore guidance and best practices for architects using AI, including reassessment of responsible control parameters and identification of best practices for ethical AI usage.
You can explore the evolution of AI and its role in practice in further detail as part of our recent Archinect In-Depth: Artificial Intelligence series here.
2 Comments
As a profession, both architects and other building design professionals... I think AI can be a useful tool. AI like these evolved "ELIZA" programs adapted to various uses are tools.... AI Office Assistant (Virtual Receptionist). For example, we can have an AI Assistant (a bot or such) help us as professionals being our assistant. Fielding common questions and data (like a smart interactive form) where it helps prospective clients setup appointment and begin inquiring questions that can help with putting together our the things that would assist us in getting to know the client's project.
Ultimately, an AI is really in major core part a complex multi-tier nested and concurrent conditional logic. This kind of AI (an Architect's "Alexa" --- don't say her name out loud, she just might respond to you). In addition, the AI can be used in full robotics and that can be possibly useful for us. The point is we are in charge and ultimately in control. These are tools or assistants to us.
While certain clerical roles might change in the workplace of firms. Some jobs like traditional receptionists maybe replaced by the AI but their role be morphed into something more than the person answering the phone initially. If done well, such an AI can be useful and nicer to work with than what we have seen. There maybe something from which we can also use the tools of AI and modern technologies as design or engineering assistance tools. As computers are used do energy analysis. Adding an "Alexa"-like touch to these tools and then it does analysis as it does, it can make more human friendly feedback.
These tools are really just doing what they been doing but with maybe a human friendly touch by adding natural language processing and voice recognition and basically a voice to text process on top of natural language processing. We been doing stuff like natural language processing with keyboard input since the 1960s with ELIZA and the likes.
We must as professionals not just rely on the input as fact but verify. The tool is a tool, an assistant. Like that intern assistant who doesn't know the job of the profession to be in charge maybe tasked to do a task and needs us to verify, correct, or otherwise help it "learn" but also help it do its job better for us but as an assistant but we actually in charge of design decision making. It can help with generative processes but we may need to make correction. While "machine learning", a part of this concept behind artificial intelligence, natural language processing, could lead to it learning and doing a better job at assistance. Kind of like JARVIS in the Iron Man movies. The actual decision making rests with us. For small firms who might not be able to hire a comprehensive office assistant staff, we may be able to use such AI tools to help.
There is a number of things to consider with AI and its applications and various ethical issues.
Let that be known, as an image maker, AI is already used widely in architecture.
The strong keywords, are "new labor-saving tools".
Ethics, what ethics? Old white man's ethics? Or, the corporate copycats' ethics?
All of these sound like NCARB is testing the waters to see if it can be a party to the regulatory changes.
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