This paper examines the prevalence of bias in artificial intelligence text-to-image models utilized in the architecture and design disciplines. The rapid pace of advancements in machine learning technologies, particularly in text-to-image generators, has significantly increased over the past year, making these tools more accessible to the design community. Accordingly, this paper aims to critically document and analyze the collective, computational, and cognitive biases that designers may encounter when working with these tools at this time. The paper delves into three hierarchical levels of operation and investigates the possible biases present at each level. Starting with the training data for large language models (LLM), the paper explores how these models may create biases privileging English-language users and perspectives. The paper subsequently investigates the digital materiality of models and how their weights generate specific aesthetic results. Finally, the report concludes by examining user biases through their prompt and image selections and the potential for platforms to perpetuate these biases through the application of user data during training.

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Emerging technologies of design and production have largely changed the role of drawings within the contemporary design process from that of design generators to design products. As architectural design has shifted from an analog drawing-based paradigm to that of a computational model-based paradigm, the agency of the drawing as a critical and important form of design representation has greatly diminished. As our design tools have increasingly become computational and the production of our drawings have become predominantly automated, this paper examines the effects on the architectural discipline and attempts to catalog examples of how artists, designers, architects, and programmers have used rule-based techniques in the process of drawing as a critical act in their process. Furthermore, the paper presents the Drawing Codes project, an ongoing research and exhibition platform that critically investigates the intersection of code and drawing: how rules and constraints inform the ways architects document, analyze, represent, and design the built environment. The project features commissioned drawings by a range of contemporary architects and designers as a means of gathering a diverse set of perspectives on how computational techniques, but more importantly, computational thinking, can reexamine the role of architectural drawing as a creative and critical act.

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