It looks more like a chicken carcass than a drone. Wishbone-thin struts hold together a skeletal scaffold that seems too fragile to fly.

But don’t be fooled. It may not look it, but this design is one of the strongest among thousands of alternatives. We know because an artificial intelligence has dreamed up and tested every one of them.

The use of massive computing power to conjure radical new designs automatically – a process known as generative design – is revolutionising the way human designers work, letting us build things we previously couldn’t have imagined.

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The technology is already designing everyday industrial components from seatbelt brackets in cars and motorbike chassis to cabin partitions in passenger aircraft. Not only are these computer-generated designs stronger and lighter than human-crafted solutions but they’re weird – designs that no human would have come up with in the first place.

“The computer can really surprise you,” says Lilli Smith at Autodesk in Boston, a software design company which has several generative designs under its belt, including the unusual drone chassis.