Artificial Intelligence designed this ‘typical’ South Carolina home. What do local design experts think?
By Mary Dimitrov
Add “design a custom home” to the ever-growing list of artificial intelligence capabilities. All Star Home Improvement asked an AI generator to envision a “typical home” in all 50 states and the 30 largest cities in the U.S. While at first glance the South Carolina home might look like it could fit right into the Lowcountry, home-building experts don’t agree with what the machine generated.
Allen Patterson Builders have been home builders for four generations with the Patterson family tracing its roots in the Beaufort area back to the early 1700s. President Allen Patterson founded the custom home building company in 2004. “This house is not realistic for a typical South Carolina Home,” Patterson said. “While it may have echoes of antebellum architecture, it is actually three separate eras blended unsuccessfully.”
He said the home is a mix of modern Renaissance, Victorian and contemporary craftsman “attempting to be something they are not.” While each of those distinct styles can be found in South Carolina, they’re never hodge-podged onto one home, Vice President of Construction Tom Tretheway said.
Tretheway said that many South Carolina neighborhoods have specific design guidelines that don’t allow the blending of styles like the one in the AI-generated rendering. He also noted the brick is deep-red and mid-Atlantic, typical of Antebellum homes in Georgia or Alabama. It’s not the Savannah Gray brick often seen in Lowcountry homes.
The homes were generated by a program called Midjourney with the prompt: “a typical, beautiful house in (State name) in 2023. Photorealistic, very realistic, life-like, sunny day, as if taken with a Canon TS-E 17mm f/4L lens at 1/4 sec, f/7.1 and ISO400.”
“It’s subtle changes in the material and the color that aren’t truly part of what you see a lot of in South Carolina,” Tretheway said. The entire gallery can be viewed at: https://allstarhome.com/resources/ai-imagines-a-typical-home/
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