When you’re trying to communicate or understand ideas, words don’t always do the trick. Sometimes the more efficient approach is to do a simple sketch of that concept — for example, diagramming a circuit might help make sense of how the system works.

But what if artificial intelligence could help us explore these visualizations? While these systems are typically proficient at creating realistic paintings and cartoonish drawings, many models fail to capture the essence of sketching: its stroke-by-stroke, iterative process, which helps humans brainstorm and edit how they want to represent their ideas.

A new drawing system from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Stanford University can sketch more like we do. Their method, called “SketchAgent,” uses a multimodal language model — AI systems that train on text and images, like Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet — to turn natural language prompts into sketches in a few seconds. For example, it can doodle a house either on its own or through collaboration, drawing with a human or incorporating text-based input to sketch each part separately.

The researchers showed that SketchAgent can create abstract drawings of diverse concepts, like a robot, butterfly, DNA helix, flowchart, and even the Sydney Opera House. One day, the tool could be expanded into an interactive art game that helps teachers and researchers diagram complex concepts or give users a quick drawing lesson.