An Indian architect was excited about the potential for AI to enhance the creativity of city architecture, and he asked an image bot to generate a vision for the future of cities.

All he had to do was enter a series of text prompts, for which he used some like ‘Utopian Technology' and ‘Futuristic Towers'.

Delightfully, the AI software called Midjourney, didn't produce a grey-sky mechanical utopia of humans trapped in battery pods like in The Matrix. Instead, it depicted buildings cloaked in vertical forests and vegetation while borrowing structural shapes from nature.

Manas Bhatia, like so many architects around the world, believes that the profession needs to make as much room for nature as possible to guarantee a more sustainable future. For his project "AI x Future Cities" he used Midjourney to create what the human minds at his firm, Ant Studio, might not be able to come up with on their own—a creative element he sees as offering huge potential for positive change in the field.

Working on the project, Bhatia would change the text prompts by putting new words in and taking other ones out, while both he and the AI worked together to refine their vision for future cities.

"The trial-and-error part is the most fun," Bhatia told CNN. "We use AI to create images and, in the process, the AI trains itself and improves over time."

Bhatia is extremely positive about the future of AI, as opposed to seeing it as something that will potentially put him out of a job.

"It has tremendous potential," he said. "At our studio, we tried using AI to generate mood board images for a client presentation, and that went very well… In the near future, architects and designers combined with AI would be something to hope for."

He worked on another section for his project by using words like "symbiotic," and "hollowed" and his AI created pictures of apartment blocks built into hollowed-out trees.

At Ant Studio, he works to replace existing building facades with nature-inspired skins that thermoregulate themselves, reducing the need for energy consumption in the building. His logic in asking the AI to imagine tree apartments stems from this work, which he assumes would be optimal if the building itself, and not just the facade, were made of living forms.

He also designs all manner of structures with nature and natural forms and functions at the center of the blueprints, including buildings built around trees.

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