Comment by torginus
6 days ago
The first example of generating home interiors fills me with indescribable hatred. Recently real estate agents have taken to running every dilapidated unsellable apartment through these AI filters, and you have to scroll through a dozen of these Ikea-chic images of what the apartment presumably could look like, before you are allowed to see the horrors they are trying to peddle at insane prices.
I think that should be illegal and misrepresenting. Lots of gray area with AI usage.
California recently added new laws regarding AI in real estate. I think lighting corrections and cropping is allowed but other digitally altered images should include a link to the original.
https://lewisbrisbois.com/insights/clientalerts/new-californ...
https://dre.ca.gov/Licensees/Advisories/Advisory_2026_03_17_...
what is considered original? AI enhancements built into the camera will be part of the original?
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It’s pretty much always been against the rules of the mls to use altered photos. Pre ai, people would sometimes get busted for making grass where there was none, or making walls with cracks a solid color. It’s not allowed to alter condition of property.
Staging and virtual staging (including sky replacement and removal of trash cans) are allowed so long as they don’t alter the true nature of the salable property.
I am surprised that AI hasn’t been policed more. Probably they just don’t have the ops for it.
Wouldn't that fall under existing false advertising laws, if you're putting fake/altered images in the listing?
It should, I would assume. But for some reason, it seems nobody is enforcing consumer protections like they used to.
Pretty soon they'll take the stickers off mowers warning people to not put their hand under it while it's running.
The world isn't in a good place...
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Trump Mobile did the same with the false advertising of their phone, and that’s apparently okay.
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It seems the solution could be quite simple.
Basically you buy/rent whatever was advertised, and if reality doesn't match, welp thats a defect the seller/landlord must fix at their own expense.
Room shows a vent but in reality there isn't one? Well, the seller has to install it or cover the costs of what an installation would cost.
That only works if the fix is cheaper than their lawyer. You’ll have to sue.
If you do sue and it’s a rental, good luck renting ever again. You’ll never pass the background checks.
This same thing happened to me almost 20 years ago without AI. The pictures were all of another identical apartment in the building.
When we went there to see the one we’d actually be renting, it was clear it hadn’t been cleaned in years, doors were off the hinges, counters had holes burned in them, stove was kicked in, etc.
Ran fast from that “deal”.
It already is in a lot of jurisdictions for photo-shopping photos.
Doctoring a photo slightly to make an area look larger, or just using a wide-angle lens though it can cause visible distortion. Removing unsightly poles, signs, trees, neighbouring properties was also common.
Making the sky bluer and removing clouds is acceptable.
You can renovate your home to match an altered image, but you cant change the colour of the actual sky so in a sense that is “more false” advertising. :)
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Quite a few times I've seen permanent light fixtures that don't exist, vents that don't exist, room sizes that are obviously implied to be much larger than reality (e.g. they show a full-size bed, but there's only like 4 feet of space in that location), etc.
I don't particularly mind fake furniture, but if it's very much not to scale I think it's pushing "probably fraud". And when permanent fixtures are fabricated, "blatant fraud, penalize immediately, revoke license on repeats". Using an automated tool does not absolve you of consequences, particularly one nigh-universally well-known to fabricate things.
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What, after all, is a bit of light fraud, if it saves an estate agent some time?
I can’t tell through text if you’re being sarcastic or not. So I’ll add some context for fun. Ran into this a few weeks ago apartment shopping with a friend. AI images of multiple apartments had:
- Relocated the sink from the back counter to the kitchen island.
- Added outlets that didn’t exist.
- Displayed furniture layouts that were not possible in the actual space. That couch looks great in that spot, except when you explore further you realize it’s sitting right up against the master bedroom’s door.
To that last point, no stager would lay it out that way because anyone viewing the apartment would take them to task for you know… having to drag a couch out of the way to open their bedroom door. Staging layouts have always been more pretty than practical but AI staging regularly puts functionally DOA layouts on display.
As far as I’m concerned it’s disingenuous at best, and deception realistically. The process is broken while this slop is in there.
I think the real issue here is lack of progress in AR technology. Tenants may be disappointed by the difference between marketing material and reality, but that can be easily solved by AR glasses that the tenants can wear 24/7 to make the apartment look just like in marketing material, perhaps for a small monthly subscription fee. It's cheaper than renovation, that's for sure.
Mark Zuckerberg should take note.
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I'm not sure if you're being serious but it should be illegal because they're producing images that are often not physically possible. At least if an agent stages an apartment with real furniture they are doing something a tenant really could do. But these AI images tend to change the physical dimensions of a room, use images of furniture that don't make sense dimensionally, shift the "natural" light of the room in a way that the sun will never provide and sometimes even change the view through the windows of the room.
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‘Catfishing is fine’
Honestly, given the dangerously unmitigated power of Claude Mythos, we should really look into arresting the people who have failed to ask Claude to cure cancer already.
As a rule of thumb, if it is just replacing staging, I don’t have an issue with it. A staged apartment also isn’t “real” so if the AI isn’t adding windows and outlets that don’t exist it’s functionally equivalent to staging.
Most real estate agents are going to stage a house or condo for real regardless because people are really going to go there, not just look at pictures online or show up with a VR headset. So in practice this is only going to affect rental units that are not staged.
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Fraud is not the same as productivity buddy
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It.... took me awhile to register that sarcasm. Bravo.
This is satire, correct?
/s?
And it's borderline fraud, I think I saw an apartment on Streeteasy where they were able to 'fit' an entire desk, drawers and a queen size bed, obviously these image models just scale these down to proportions that just don't exist in real life.
the actual bedroom could only fit queen size bed ;(
How is that borderline, that’s just actual fraud.
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Wait, Are you saying 2 adults and a kid should barely fit a queen bed?
https://www.amazon.com/iDOO-Mattress-Inflatable-Camping-infl...
I guess you could call it a Qwen size bed
I don't hate virtual decorations in apartment sales images, since it helps with trying to get a scale of the room, but the AI ones these days just make it completely impossible to trust. I've seen plenty where I have a hard time believing it could actually fit the furniture in the picture. Obviously a real estate agent should check that the images have realistic proportions, but there's no signal that I could trust them. It just says "decorated with AI" or something.
Accepting 100% that it should be in some way deemed unacceptable (socially or legally) to fake what an apartment actually looks like, I did find using an image model really helpful in making design choices for my bathroom remodel. Mostly about whether to tile certain things where we couldn't quite visualize ourselves what the effect on the entire space would be.
It should be the same as rule #1 of machine translation: never machine translate something for your recipient unless they ask for it. They may not need it. If they do need it, they almost certainly know where to find machine translation. A bad translation with no original is worse than nothing, because you often end up having to mentally backtranslate a broken version of your native language in order to understand what they were trying to say.
Likewise, if I want to see AI renders of what the apartment may one day maybe look like - I can ask for it. Or make the render myself with my tool of choice. But I'll need to know what it actually looks like to do that.
Sadly Google in particular don't obey rule #1 even for machine translation, so it's going to be an uphill battle to get companies to understand.
There's a big difference of someone using the tool to make design decisions for work they are actually going to implement vs someone using the same tool to make one think it has already been done
Where I live (NYC) putting altered images like that has been the norm for more than a decade.
It’s just used to be more expensive to hire someone to do it for you.
The altered images always e free stirs the same bright walls and grey magazine style furniture.
AI is just making it cheaper, but this was bound to happen.
(Images altered this way do have a small watermark stating so)
Also NYC. A classic was mounting a bright light outside a window so it appears as “sun-drenched” as the description claimed.
(Unrelated, my favorite one was getting to the apartment and learning the “bedroom” was a flex wall in the kitchen)
AI has very uniquely made creating these faked/impossible layout images one of the cheapest & easiest things you can do at the moment, even if it didn't introduce the concept. Simultaneously, AI has had very little cost reduction impact on much else. This change in relative balance is how AI has created the new version of the problem and it's not apparent how this imbalance was always bound to occur without AI.
Features? Which TTS are you using? I was until recently using Gboard but it's been getting unusable lately.
Just having a good photographer is amazing. When my friend was selling their place I was amazed and how good the house looked in the listing. How big it looked, when I know it was not big. This was before AI filters were available. So not a new issue but certainly made worse and cheaper to do.
Even if you're not a good photographer, wide angle lenses make rooms look enormous, by exaggerating the size difference between close and far objects. Before AI most estate agents used that.
I just started seeing these pop up a few weeks ago after some very obvious AI edits appeared in my searches. It’s entirely possibly realtors have been doing this for years now, just in less obvious ways. This crosses the line for me as they’re clearly making spaces look far bigger and brighter than they actually are. Straight up fraudulent and deceptive behavior.
In a sane world, this would be a clear cut case of false advertisement, and the real estate agents would be held liable for fraud. Sadly, we don't live in a sane world.
This!!
2 months ago while looking for apartments, the majority of the pics shown were generated by AI. The pictures generated by AI often looked much more brighter, cleaner and larger and when I visited them in person, they were the opposite. I wasted so much time visiting due to this.
I understand the intention but the pictures are so wrong most of the time and hide so much imperfection that it should be illegal for false advertisement.
I keep hoping the fucking barn doors people are putting in houses now are an AI illusion, but that's never the case. Barn doors. In the god damned house. Talk about a crime.
Using it for "staging" shitty rentals is pretty gross, but I used Nano Banana to make some mockups for a bath room remodel I'm doing and it worked pretty great.
I sense a business opportunity: a web app that de-sloppifies real estate, airbnb, and vrbo photos! See what it really looks like, thanks to the power of AI!
AirBnB folks are doing the same.
Instead of fighting the use of AI for home interior picture, it might be more useful to have an AI that can correct the fabricated images. If the listing includes room sizes, an AI should be able to give you more realistic images. Maybe a browser plugin that makes all content honest?
Why would that be more useful than fighting this fraud? Surely the original images would be more realistic than one passed through AI two times.
What is an original image? A good photographer can also create a completely different impression. And it's hard to get rules applied, suing is often too expensive, for consumers, and governments need to reduce costs, so don't have the funding. It will not be enforceable enough that people wont try tampering with their picture.
If you make it a technical solution, e.g., browser plugin, it become an economic opportunity that can create money instead of cost money.
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That's actually illegal in most states.
I think it makes houses/apartment less likely to sell. When you see the idealized version, and then the reality, the impact is much bigger then just showing reality.
Unless people prove me wrong, and they really fall for that...
Its like we used to be flooded with fisheye lens pictures of homes, that made the rooms way bigger then reality. I noticed that this trend (on the immo that i follow for years) has heavily reduced. Because nothing beats a sale, as people seeing something looking spacious on pictures and then in person seen its way more small/cramped/compact.
I love that new trend of 3D home viewing... It saves you so much time, and saves time for the immo people, filters out a lot of people with less interest.
When you do get the privilege of seeing the unit in person, yeah. This is obviously the case for most home sales.
But there are plenty of rental markets where you can be forced to rent without seeing that exact unit first. Common in big complexes, where you might get shown a "similar unit" or in markets where rental vacancy is so low that if you don't apply & sign within hours, you aren't getting that apartment because there's 20+ potential tenants for every rare vacancy. The current renal home I live in I rented without seeing it in person first because it was the only vacancy at the time, and in that market you must be first to sign the lease or you lose.
If the industry is currently so favourable to the landlord, then why would they need to alter images in the first place?
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There needs to be lawsuits over stuff like that. I don't get why people accept blatant false advertising just cause the tech used to do it is new. They may as well be uploading pictures of a real, nicer apartment with a similar layout. What's the difference?
The difference is you'll get caught a luddite and hear you're opposing progress if you try to get in the way of AI doing any and everything.
I don't think that matters in a court of law.
Honestly a great start up would be a review system for house listings.
Users can rate how accurate the description was, the real life flaws and even upload their own photos.
Side note: last time I looked for a house I really wasted 95% of my time because every house had one unique major flaw that would have made me not even bother going to see it.
Announcers get very touchy with listings data, so even compiling listings from multiple sources is hard without getting cease-and-desisted. Then, realtors will certainly flood competing announcements and post fake reviews. It's an aggressive market.
Honestly just market to customers that feel deceived. They just log in and enter an address and post a review. No listing data needed.
You could get really sophisticated with quality checking reviews.
(We tend to believe all review systems have to be bad because that’s all we see. But most reviews systems are broken because a working system is a conflict of interest for the platform they’re on.)
Isnt this what people have been doing for years now with their phone filters? misrepresenting their physical appearance in order to sell the idea that they are something they're not
The entire real estate industry is disgusting.
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