  Recent diffusion-based AI art platforms are able to create impressive images
from simple text descriptions. This makes them powerful tools for concept
design in any discipline that requires creativity in visual design tasks. This
is also true for early stages of architectural design with multiple stages of
ideation, sketching and modelling. In this paper, we investigate how applicable
diffusion-based models already are to these tasks. We research the
applicability of the platforms Midjourney, DALL-E 2 and StableDiffusion to a
series of common use cases in architectural design to determine which are
already solvable or might soon be. We also analyze how they are already being
used by analyzing a data set of 40 million Midjourney queries with NLP methods
to extract common usage patterns. With this insights we derived a workflow to
interior and exterior design that combines the strengths of the individual
platforms.
