In a new paper, researchers from MIT, Harvard, and the Toyota Research Institute found that generative AI can help designers come up with new ideas by quickly creating images based on text prompts. Specifically, designers with access to a generative AI tool the researchers developed called DesignAID found the tool more useful than a traditional image search.

“For each of a number of diverse verbal descriptions, DesignAID can almost instantly generate an image — and it’s often far better developed and polished than what an artist or designer could do with a quick sketch,” said paper co-author a professor of information technology at MIT Sloan and the director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.

Designers find value in AI-generated images

The early stages of design are the best times to come up with diverse, sometimes unconventional ideas. But this can be difficult. It usually takes a large team to generate lots of ideas, and it takes time to create visual representations of them, such as sketches. The process is also expensive: In the automotive industry, it can cost $1 billion to design a new car and $3 billion to redesign an existing car. Given those factors, even the most seasoned designers might opt for what’s familiar.

For the study, researchers had 87 crowdsourced designers use the DesignAID tool to create a mood board, or a set of images that helps capture the artistic direction of a project. DesignAID produces images that are based on a written description of the design problem, as well as automatically generated variations of this description. To generate diverse variations of the description, the tool uses a technique called semantic embedding, which combines a word’s contextual meaning and statistical similarities among words to come up with additional variations.

Participants found the automatic generation of images from words “more inspirational, enjoyable, and useful” than simply searching for images on a website such as Pinterest. However, the designers said they found the tool more valuable for image generation than for generating diverse ideas.