05/18/2026
Today, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) hosted a zoom conference about AI and our professional responsibility in the changing world. I sat with 500 Landscape Architects about what it is doing and not doing to make us better in our profession. This is what we all agreed upon. Crazy how we all feel this way.
- AI is a tool, much like google, to help gain ideas.
- AI does not give anyone realistic understanding of the complexity of our profession when it comes to site analysis and plant communities.
-AI can not interpret long term environmental impacts and sustainability of the built world in relation to human health and safety.
- AI data centers fragment habitat communities, heats the Earth and pollutes water.
- AI devalues our intelligence and creativity to where people think what it creates is reality.
- AI data centers need to be conducted by Landscape Architects in terms of land use and the best practices it can achieve to minimize the impact of the environment.
- AI data centers may be obsolete one day, leaving acres of “brownfields” that will take years to recover as habitable land.
Best way to adjust to data centers is to learn what its impacting in our lives currently and think of alternatives of how to achieve sustainable results by focusing on what we truly know as professionals.
