AI vs Human Designer: Fendi Kan Scallop Purse

Given the limit of a quick one day design project, could an AI design better than myself?  

This was an interesting one day challenge to do while home for the Christmas vacation.  My girlfriend's friend recently got a nice Fendi Kan Scallop purse for Christmas, and it was soon put on my radar.   Well you know what I said, “Girlfriend, we have Fendi at home!”

Started the human modeling process with good ol' Autodesk Fusion360.  The purse was generally a simply style, with a couple 3d lofts necessary for some elements, but all in all it wasn't too difficult to get within 80ish percent accuracy using online images.  In parallel I also worked the AI workflow.  

Took available online images of the purse and ran them through a 3 AI image to 3d Model Generators available online (hitem3d, hunyuan, Tripo3d) to create a few STLs.  The results ranged from not bad, to blurry and poor.  All of them would have issues being dumped into a slicer without serious rework of the meshes to make them “printable” files without issue.  The best of the AI outputs came from hunyuan.

At the end of the day we have a keychain version made from the human design, (handle is omitted); and an AI version made into a tea light.  NOTE: the AI versions handle broke off every time I printed it.  AI model didn't really account for weak thin straps.  I just simply cleaned up the pieces and glued the handle in place.  

I will admit if I didn't have any discerning sense of output quality it would be very very easy to just grab images, prompts and whatever poop and simply churn out models and upload daily.  Yes the models would generally be a nightmare to print and remove supports, but I can understand how designers who don't know any better would dilute the online model space with poor models using this workflow.  

With how active and fast the AI space is moving, along with advancements in printing/filament tech, perhaps this will be how models are created 5 years from now?  Until then I will be appreciating the quirks of the odd brush stroke, the thoughtful ness of a well designed print profile, and laughter I get from a genuinely original idea that only human touch can deliver.  For now at least….