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The first example of generating home interiors fills me with indescribable hatred. Recently real estate agents have taken to running every dilapidated unsellabl
by torginus 4mo 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.
- psygn89 4mo agoI think that should be illegal and misrepresenting. Lots of gray area with AI usage.
- etdznots 4mo ago[flagged]
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- mvdtnz 4mo agoI'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.
- phainopepla2 4mo agoI think their last sentence is a pretty clear indicator that they were not being serious.
- rsynnott 4mo agoAs with bitcoin fans before them, Poe's Law is in full effect with the AI boosters.
- rsynnott 4mo agoWhat, after all, is a bit of light fraud, if it saves an estate agent some time?
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- Groxx 4mo agoQuite 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.
- taneq 4mo agoOh, and little touches like an ugly fence being replaced by a sweeping view of a beach or a mountain range.
- denkmoon 4mo agolol. Minor touchups! Anything which could have a material impact on the sale price which is misrepresented in images is fraud, plain and simple.
- topgrain2 4mo agoI was seeing the fake light fixtures in listing photos at least four years ago. Fake furniture is bad enough (the scale issue you mention is the main problem) but fake parts of the house should definitely be illegal.
- CobrastanJorji 4mo agoHonestly, 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.
- robbiep 4mo ago‘Catfishing is fine’
- rwyinuse 4mo agoI 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.
- gtowey 4mo agoNow you're thinking like a silicon valley founder! Brilliant! Call the company "Lipstyk" as in the old phrase about lipstick on a pig.
- gruez 4mo ago/s?
- diab0lic 4mo agoI 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.
- janalsncm 4mo agoAs 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.
- DrewADesign 4mo agoI imagine this is a much larger problem in high turnover rental markets.
- throwaway27448 4mo agoFraud is not the same as productivity buddy
- DrewADesign 4mo agoThe circa 2026 tech industry c-suite crowd respectfully, but vigorously, disagrees.
- King-Aaron 4mo agoThis is satire, correct?
- izacus 4mo agoIt.... took me awhile to register that sarcasm. Bravo.
- Ajedi32 4mo agoWouldn't that fall under existing false advertising laws, if you're putting fake/altered images in the listing?
- HumblyTossed 4mo agoIt 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...
- thewebguyd 4mo ago> it seems nobody is enforcing consumer protections like they used to I'll preface this by saying that I don't agree with how things are working currently. But, the way the existing protections get enforced is by an individual or group of individuals filing lawsuits. Our regulatory agencies have either been completely gutted by DOGE, or just no longer have an appetite to do any kind of proactive enforcement, so its now up to the victims who have been wronged to bring the violation to the attention of the courts/regulatory bodies responsible for enforcement. Part of me feels like this is intentional and by design, because bringing suit is an expensive and time consuming process and naturally locks out the people harmed the most by these violations. Its the same method by which slumlords/bad landlords get away with so many blatant violations of the various landlord/tenant laws; their tenants can't afford the lawsuits and the lawyers to protect themselves. The legal system needs to be made much more accessible, but I'm not sure how that happens or what that looks like.
- underlipton 4mo ago>so its now up to the victims who have been wronged to bring the violation to the attention of the courts/regulatory bodies responsible for enforcement. lol Have you tried finding a lawyer recently? For anything? >The legal system needs to be made much more accessible, but I'm not sure how that happens or what that looks like. As far as consumer protection goes, the party with greater resources or sophistication (e.g., if you retain counsel against a pro se defendant or plaintiff) should have a higher standard of proof; be forced to follow formal procedural rules, no matter the venue; and bear all costs if they're the ones who brought suit. If you use the court system as an arm of your business, you shouldn't get any leniency in terms of crossing your t's and dotting your i's. I don't know how you get there, but that's the fastest way to level the playing field.
- pkaye 4mo agoCalifornia 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-california-law-requires-real-estate-agents-and-brokers-to-disclose-ai-alterations-in-listings https://lewisbrisbois.com/insights/clientalerts/new-californ... https://dre.ca.gov/Licensees/Advisories/Advisory_2026_03_17_AI_in_California_Real_Estate.html https://dre.ca.gov/Licensees/Advisories/Advisory_2026_03_17_...
- a1000regrets 4mo agowhat is considered original? AI enhancements built into the camera will be part of the original?
- pkaye 4mo agoI imagine if these cameras are adding or remove furniture, appliances or modifying flooring or the landscaping via AI it will be a problem. Edit: also if it becomes a big problem, in the future the law could be changed so that the real estate agent becomes liable to cover the cost of upgrading the property to match the altered image.
- apinstein 4mo agoI mean it’s already fraud to do so today… you cannot misrepresent the condition of a property. I think the harm so far has just been wasted time and thus no standing for lawsuits yet.
- kube-system 4mo agoYou can stage a property with furniture. Previously that was done with rental furniture.
- fragmede 4mo agoYes but that cost a lot more money.
- nubg 4mo agoIt 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.
- drdexebtjl 4mo agoThat 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.
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- dwd 4mo agoIt 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.
- faeyanpiraat 4mo agoYou 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. :)
- apinstein 4mo agoIt’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.
- doubled112 4mo agoThis 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”.
- ms7m 4mo agoAnd 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 ;(
- echoangle 4mo agoHow is that borderline, that’s just actual fraud.
- NonHyloMorph 4mo ago[flagged]
- diordiderot 4mo agoThis type of comment is generally frowned upon on hn. That's what the upvote/downvote feature is for.
- port11 4mo ago“This” is one of the most nonsensical Reddit mannerisms, it’s karma-farming instead of upvoting.
- Hamuko 4mo agoI 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.
- ragazzina 4mo agoWait, Are you saying 2 adults and a kid should barely fit a queen bed? https://www.amazon.com/iDOO-Mattress-Inflatable-Camping-inflable/dp/B0C8TF4VK8 https://www.amazon.com/iDOO-Mattress-Inflatable-Camping-infl...
- bakugo 4mo agoIn 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.
- darrylb42 4mo agoJust 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.
- ajb 4mo agoEven 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.
- strulovich 4mo agoWhere 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)
- lelandfe 4mo agoAlso 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)
- zamadatix 4mo agoAI 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.
- dotancohen 4mo ago> e free stirs Features? Which TTS are you using? I was until recently using Gboard but it's been getting unusable lately.
- dgacmu 4mo agoAccepting 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.
- vintermann 4mo agoIt 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.
- dylan604 4mo agoThere'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
- hbn 4mo agoThere 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?
- andersonpico 4mo agoThe 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.
- hbn 4mo agoI don't think that matters in a court of law.
- bilsbie 4mo agoHonestly 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.
- andersonpico 4mo agoAnnouncers 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.
- bilsbie 4mo agoHonestly 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.)
- haskaalo 4mo agoThis!! 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.
- xvxvx 4mo agoI 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.
- ako 4mo agoInstead 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?
- andersonpico 4mo agoWhy would that be more useful than fighting this fraud? Surely the original images would be more realistic than one passed through AI two times.
- ako 4mo agoWhat 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.
- sjsdaiuasgdia 4mo ago> it become an economic opportunity that can create money instead of cost money. Cool, so money is made from lying to me, and more money is to be made from what is fundamentally still lying to me, but with somewhat different intent. That seems like a lot of pointless economic friction that doesn't generate real value, but what do I know.
- benjiro29 4mo agoI 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.
- thewebguyd 4mo agoWhen 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.
- dotancohen 4mo agoIf the industry is currently so favourable to the landlord, then why would they need to alter images in the first place?
- ssl-3 4mo agoBecause it's all about revenue, and falsehoods help justify even higher prices.
- breezybottom 4mo agoNo one said they "need" to. But there is more generally more than one landlord in a market, and they might feel pressured to keep up with their competitors' use of AI.
- IAmGraydon 4mo agoThat's actually illegal in most states.
- jszymborski 4mo agoAirBnB folks are doing the same.
- chickensong 4mo agoThe entire real estate industry is disgusting.
- VectorLock 4mo agoUsing 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.
- SwellJoe 4mo agoI 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.
- levocardia 4mo agoI 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!
- hansmayer 4mo ago[dead]
- pelagicAustral 4mo agoIsnt 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