TOPOPHYLA’S EXPLORATIONS IN AI
HEAD DOWN THE GARDEN PATH.

“The fascinating thing about this one is that it kind of does look like the finished project, and the layering of the plants is pretty appropriate. The context trees are actually fairly accurate. I don’t know how it got that there were conifers in the background, but it did.”

—Eric Arneson

Eric Arneson likes to play with new technology. Along with Nahal Sohbati, Arneson is one-half of Topophyla Landscape Design, a California-based design firm, but he’s probably better known online as @pangeaexpress, the 95K-followers-and-counting Instagram account where he shares the firm’s design process through a mix of rapid-fire tutorials, memes, and AI-generated images. The recent addition of a multimodal feature to OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, prompted Arneson to start playing around with planting plans. He uploaded a screenshot of a plan from a finished project, and after a few tries, he got the image above—hypervivid, but not too far off from the real thing.