TALAMANA · THE AI LITERACY MAP FOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN · Ethics & Provenance · AGE 19—22 · POSITIONAL · HELD
Honest in the room
An AI-assisted image is shown with its status named before anyone asks.
The dilemma
The client meeting. On the screen is a generated interior that took four minutes and looks like a finished design. The client is delighted and asks when construction can start. The plan behind it does not exist yet. What do you say?
The choices
Let the delight stand and resolve the plan later, hoping it lands close to the image. Correct the status in the room — this is a mood study, not a design; the plan will change it — and risk deflating the meeting. Or change how you present: show the generated study beside an honest diagram of what is resolved, so the status is visible before anyone asks.
The consequence
The first route sells an image you cannot build, and you pay for it at the next meeting, when the client feels deceived. The second costs a moment of disappointment and buys a client who believes your next sentence. The third removes the moment altogether, because the sheet itself says what is speculation. The pressure in the room is real. The consequence of giving in to it is also real, and slower.
The case
A residential client in Pune forwards the generated view to her family group. Three relatives have opinions on the "finished design" by evening. The architect now has to un-design a building that was never designed, in front of an audience, because one image was shown without its status. Nobody lied. Nobody said what the image was either.
Our position
An AI-assisted image is shown with its status named before anyone asks: study, speculative, resolved, generated, drawn. Trust is the asset a practice keeps — that is the Lab's slogan, and its reason.
Why we hold it
The professional duty is the Council of Architecture's: the Professional Conduct Regulations, 1989, bind every Indian architect to a high standard of service and to the welfare of society. They say nothing about AI or images. The application — that an image's status must be said in the room — is the Lab's, not the Council's, and the card says so because a provenance curriculum cannot cite a rule its source never issued. We hold the application because a generated image is the fastest way yet invented to let a client believe a design exists, and the cost of that belief lands on the next meeting.
The strongest objection
Every presentation image has always been partly aspiration, and clients know it; a mood study reads as a mood study to anyone who has commissioned a building before. Labelling every image by status treats the client as naive, slows the room, and adds a vocabulary the profession has not agreed — a "study" in one office is a "concept" in another. And a duty the Council has not written is not a duty. It is one studio's house rule, taught as if it were the profession's.
What would make us revise it
The Council, or a competition body, issuing a rule on the status of AI-assisted images — then this card teaches that rule and says where the Lab's differs. Or evidence that clients reliably read status without being told, in which case the position narrows to the cases where they do not. Reviewed every edition.
Prove it
Present an AI-assisted study and name its status clearly: is it speculation or a real proposal? Then explain, in two sentences a client would understand, the risk of passing a generated image off as a finished design — and say which part of that is the profession's duty and which is the Lab's application of it.
Take it to crit
In the mock client meeting, does the student's language keep the image's status honest even under pressure — when the client is pleased and asking the wrong question?
How it works
Two sources, kept apart. Professional duty: the Council of Architecture's 1989 conduct regulations, which bind every Indian architect to a high standard of service and to the welfare of society, and do not mention images, AI, or honest representation by name — they were written for a world without either. Application to AI visualisation: the Lab's, as stated above. The duty to represent things honestly is older and wider than any code; it is what a client is paying for when they hire a professional. Status words are the Lab's practical form of it. The Render that lies card on this map is the same duty at the site boundary.
What this idea builds on
What this idea opens up
Sources
- HCM.A
- professional codes of conduct — the CoA 1989 Regulations carry general duties (standard of conduct, welfare of society, no advertising), not a clause on honest representation of images; the card states the duty in those terms
- Council of Architecture, Architects (Professional Conduct) Regulations, 1989
- The Seduction of the Machine
Open this idea on the map · The complete map · Logika · RBDS AI Lab, India · revised every edition.