Lost in translation. Pilot research on the problem of translating human thoughts into the language of the machine

The article presents the conduct of a pilot study carried out at the Institute of Architecture of the Lodz University of Technology in the summer of 2024. The subject of the research that architecture students took part in was to trace the process of creating architectural concepts using the generative image model Midjourney by individuals with no previous exposure to AI tool-assisted design, for whom English – read by a tool capable of converting a string of keywords into an image – is not their native language. The authors’ goal was to capture difficulties arising from translation errors and lack of script literacy. The precisely defined architectural design problem was carried out by the participants of the study by selecting from among the images generated in the version 6.0 model on the basis of the prompts they had previously prepared. The results indicate the challenges arising from the need to translate thoughts into a language fully understandable by the machine. The title of the article, referring to a movie Lost in translation directed by Sofia Coppola, highlights the fleeting essence of the problem: words are only a certain signaller of meaning, which often fails in the full depiction of thought.