Architecture and the Built Environment Seen Through the Eye of the Lens and AI: Does It Matter Which?

Every day, we encounter photographs that have been manipulated via computer software.However, there is an argument that deceit has always been the case with photography, and audiences of such pictures are expected to be passive in acceptance of their controlled and constructed content, regardless of provenance.However, until recently, human agency has been central to physical creative processes.Using architecture as subject focus, this article questions whether creative AI software programs can mimic known built environments effectively and if AI-generative images embodying "photographic" accuracy may be aligned with the actual places and spaces they depict.Audiences of architectural photographs should be able to "read" buildings and are generally less concerned with the method of image creation.This suggest that AI-generated works pose no greater threat to the perception of "reality" than signifiers of the subject produced by conventional cameras.Using the software program Midjourney, this study employs Methodological Pragmatism, including image analysis, interviews, and qualitative research to question if creative photorealistic AI text-to-image outputs may provide a trusted view of the world.Viewer cognition and interpretation are discussed, along with the type of authority exposing architecture as subject, asking if audience "faith" has been taken away since the emergence of AI images?The research concludes that if we could understand what we are looking at, signifier or signified, it rarely matters whether a picture was created by a camera or by a series of text-to-image prompts.Education and trust are vital.As always in photography, context is king.