Will AI change how we use AutoCAD within 5 years?

[asalas00]

I'm wondering with all of this AI technology advancing and it getting smarter everyday, do you guys think AI will be able to draft for most of our drawings? Will it be able to catch any errors and make changes to our drawings with just one-click? Will it be able to create some quick and useful macros? To imagine, all of the potential AI has with AutoCAD and its use for in the future. We all probably wouldn't be here asking questions on the forums anymore, it'll be a thing of the past because we'll be able to just ask AI.

What are your guy's standpoint or feelings towards AI and AutoCAD for the future?

[AVCPlugins]

At the moment, all neural networks are focused on text and raster graphics. There is nothing for vector drawings and solid modeling yet. In five years, fundamentally new types of neural networks will not be created or will not have time to become popular. So there will definitely be enough drawing work for our time.

As for programming, things are not so rosy here either. Without careful checking and reworking, the code created by AI is not suitable for professional use. The main problem is that AI is not familiar with the API of even such a popular program as AutoCAD. The situation is even worse with other CADs. For specialized CADs, AI cannot create anything at all. The code is obtained entirely from hallucinations. And with modern AI training methods, this is an unsolvable problem - millions of verified correct examples are needed for training, and they do not physically exist. We will have to wait for the invention of AI that can learn without examples, by trial and error. Current AI assistants cannot even check that their code does not compile. So we will have to wait a long time. I think 15-20 years. However, a sudden breakthrough is possible if an AI is created that is capable of creating new, more advanced AIs. Self-improvement may take not decades, but hours or minutes. But this will be a different civilization...

[tramber]

That depends :

If humans mostly from here are the IA's teachers (because I guess an intelligence is nothing without a learning), well than I am not sure for it's future in Autocad 😂 🤣

[Brock_Olly]

I've been meddling around with AI quite a lot in all sort of different fields and:

I'm not afraid AI will be able to 'take our jobs!' as drafters.
Right now, AI is pretty useless for us.
Eventually, it could be a useful tool to help us speed up / be more efficient, but I highly doubt it will be able to do more than 'assist' in the near future.

[pkolarik]

I would doubt it's possible in the near future at all. I remember reading a splashy magazine article back about 20 years ago stating that with computer/software advancements "Drafters will be unneeded in 5 years, and engineers will be obsolete in 10 years".... yet, here we are.

[TheCADnoob]

Something to consider is that AI has been around for quite some time. The most recent advancements with LLMs have contributed to their popularity, but there is an awful lot of hype around the technology that makes it hard to get a clear picture of where things actually are.

One big issue that will have to be breached is the interpretability of the smoke screen for the more modern versions of AI. In regards to AutoCAD and its applications to the engineering world, this is not something that anyone I know is ready to trust. What I'm getting at is that the way some of these modern AIs work is through learning that cannot be interpreted. Meaning if we want to know how it got its answer, we cannot. This is a real problem with traceability and trust in regard to engineering. This doesn't mean that its wrong or that we cannot use it, but that we need to do a lot of work on putting controls in place to make sure we can trust it. 

That said some of that future you are talking about is already here: the Markup assist tools are fantastic and can literally bring in some updates automatically. If you haven't seen those I would recommend checking it out. https://help.autodesk.com/view/ACD/2024/ENU/?guid=GUID-3F94ED5A-EAB3-46F9-89F1-6605248EEA56

In regards to macros you can already get those delivered straight to you through your "My Insights" https://help.autodesk.com/view/ACD/2024/ENU/?guid=GUID-F14ADDEB-A704-4793-BD39-0DA970165A2E

I do quite often wonder where we will be in the next few years; then I realize that there are still fax machines in our offices because, despite technological advances, adoption and acceptance take some time. I also look at the awesome VR technology out there and see that despite the awesome stuff there, the tech is not always universally applicable. 

I do hope that one day we no longer have to come here to have our questions answered, but at the same time I realize that we will likely find another reason to come here and try to troubleshoot why our AI is not drawing our AutoCAD elements the way we want them haha. 

[RSomppi]

That's not even funny. I think you've managed to insult the entire forum community.

[jskalaXDDX5]

An interesting question, but I think any answers can pretty quickly get bogged down in semantics, marketing and human ego.

I think sometimes we can take technology we are familiar with for granted.  Spel chek is a form of AI.  So is CAD.  So is a calculator if one does not understand how to perform long division.  So is an automatic transmission if one can’t (or chooses not to) work a clutch.  So is a well-trained Labrador Retriever. 

A car that can drive itself needs to be given a destination because it is not really intelligent.   

As for marketing, we are told that at one point in the Earth’s history plants did not exist. 

I guess that could make cellulose an early space age polymer…

[tramber]

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@RSomppi  a écrit :

That's not even funny. I think you've managed to insult the entire forum community.

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Including myself. Well, 25 years on the software, knowing deeply Vlisp and many fields in this huge machine, I still deliver wrong answers and I will probably take the risks again and again.

Very sorry for you if you took it bad. Hope the others didn't....

[RSomppi]

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@tramber wrote:
Very sorry for you if you took it bad. 

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I'm not sure how to take an insult any other way.

[jskalaXDDX5]

 I think you've managed to insult the entire forum community....I'm not sure how to take an insult any other way.

Individually?

[tramber]

Ok. Then my apologies for you. And in advance for others....

And good fun for those who believe that I was not offending.

[RSomppi]

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@jskalaXDDX5 wrote:

Individually?

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When the comment was about the community as a whole?

[jskalaXDDX5]

I was not offended.

[tramber]

I wanted to make a funny word about the multiplicity of our questions and answers for an IA to grow if it had to find material here or where humans talk.... That's all.

[pkolarik]

Don't worry, "the entire community" didn't take it as an insult.

[tramber]

Nice to tell. 😉 

All in all, even joking very spontaneously I had a word with a little of sense :

An IA must train. And we are so diverse, so different, dealing with such a panel of types and difficulties of drawings.

I had the opportunity to try an IA and it is impressive to write texts. Much less to generate images, to my opinion.

This is why I beleive the IA as long as it can really be individualized, could become an assistant.... let's see.

[oswe9G2ET]

i think you are safe guys, because Abstraction needed to interact with autocad and similar tools is not in AI capabilities and im not sure is gonna be....

[Cadguru42]

Will AI change how we use ACAD? Depends on how Autodesk forces it upon us. Does anyone really trust or asking for AI CAD? I haven't seen that anywhere. Even trying to use AI for scripting doesn't work properly. Autodesk's AI assistant is basically useless. Yet Autodesk is spending millions of dollars on AI instead of working to make our jobs more efficient or fixing bugs that have lasted for years. 

I'm in the civil world and every project is unique because every site is unique. AI won't be able to really help with that because it can't be trained for something that's unique. 

[paullimapa]

If you know a bit of coding using AutoLisp then the Autodesk Assistant can be helpful in generating a basic skeleton code for you to modify and adjust.