Can AI truly design a sea-going vessel

Shipwreck in the cloud: Can AI truly design a sea-going vessel?

The shop floor vs. The crochet empire

Between the roaring engines, the scent of welding fumes, and the massive inland vessels lined up for repair at our shipyard, I run my own little 'empire.' Although my male colleagues love to tease me about my "knitting hobby" — after which I corrected them for the hundredth time that it is a crochet empire — one of them recently came to me with a serious challenge. He held his phone under my nose and smirked: "Look Claudia, ChatGPT can design a seagoing ship for me in seconds. Will I even need you anymore?"

Just as you don't repair a tanker with a roll of duct tape, you can't build a solid crochet pattern on the shaky logic of an AI bot.

It is mandatory to wear a helmet on the yard!

So that's what we'll do!

The challenge: ChatGPT as naval architect

I saw it the moment I received the pattern: this is never going to be a ship! The generated image looked cute, but even the picture was full of technical errors. The pattern is also written in a way that is very different from my way of writing patterns, but the explanation of the abbreviations is included, so that's doable.

It’s fascinating how confidently such a model spits out a pattern, despite the proportions being completely off. It seems ChatGPT understands the concept of a 'boat,' but has zero spatial awareness of how those parts actually fit together.

The experiment: crocheting without thinking

Even though I could tell from the pattern that this would never become the vessel in the picture, I "dived" into my yarn stash 😉 to start crocheting this sinking ship.

• The Hull Struggle: According to ChatGPT, my ship started as a ball. A hollow ball. With some pushing, pulling, and a lot of goodwill, the hull eventually looked… well, like a boat? If you squint your eyes really hard and spin around three times. The hull was barely 4 cm long, even though the calculations suggested a 15 cm ship.
• Proportional Chaos: Then came the bridge. In the world of AI, the captain is clearly more important than buoyancy, because the bridge was so massive the hull underneath was begging for mercy. And the smokestack? It was 'Titanic' sized, giving the whole thing the appearance of a floating mushroom with an identity crisis.
• The Missing Manual: How to attach the bridge to the hull or whether the bridge needed stuffing? None of that was mentioned. It simply said: "embroider a door and windows." But how? Where exactly should the smokestack go? The essential finishing touches were completely missing.

Will you crochet with me? Here is the pattern that Chat GPT made.

Well, this is it! The Seagoing Vessel designed by Chat GPT...

I only crocheted the hull, the mounted-surface and the chimney, with a lot of kneading I got this shape. So no seagoing vessel!

Enough digital madness, back to work!

Enough kneading and fumbling. At the shipyard, we repair ships based on facts and craftsmanship, not on a lucky guess. So, I tossed that 'floating mushroom' aside, opened my own design studio, and did what an AI cannot: design a ship that actually floats.

Real design isn't a guessing game with words; it’s a mathematical puzzle. I start by sketching how the ship should look. During the design process, I might deviate from my sketch if it looks better or works better technically. To ensure the ship can sit on a table, I gave it a flat hull. From there, I slowly worked my way up.

Next came the interior and the deck. How do I attach the deck to the hull so it doesn't sink to the bottom and helps the ship maintain its shape? Once that was figured out, I focused on the bridge. As you can see: developing a crochet pattern requires just as much calculation as figuring out a complex repair on a real ship.

Speed vs. Seaworthiness

What AI does achieve? Speed. Within a minute, the bot spat out a 'ready-to-go' pattern. But what good is speed if your ship sinks on paper? My own process takes longer, and for good reason. I think about the steps, the testing, and the fine-tuning. A good pattern should be easy for everyone to follow without capsizing halfway through. There are no shortcuts to true craftsmanship.

The result of that patience is shown in the photo below: a ship that actually makes sense.

Conclusion: craftsmanship cannot be programmed

After I showed the 'masterpiece' from ChatGPT to my colleague, it stayed quiet for a moment. The result wasn't a sturdy vessel, but a shapeless heap of yarn that wouldn't survive a second at the shipyard.

Whether I’m at my desk working with the shipyard's numbers or using my crochet hook to bring a new character to life: precision is everything. An AI lacks the insight, the experience, and the love for the craft. My colleagues will surely keep teasing me about my "knitting," but they know one thing for sure now: for a real design that actually stays afloat, they need to come to my crochet empire.

What I couldn't resist was to give the Boat a different background with the help of AI! AI is suitable for that! All test crocheters have done so. See our result here!