Generative AI curses renters with the promise of impossible homes

Joyce, a native New Yorker, didn’t think finding her first solo apartment in the city would be easy. But she also didn’t think it would be “hell.” After looking through many small, expensive places that she described as “shitholes,” Joyce found the apartment of her dreams: an affordable studio in Manhattan.

“It was big and airy, and it had a fireplace,” she said. The kitchen was small but well equipped and appeared to have been recently renovated. She dropped everything to see the apartment, and when she got there, she learned that five other women, all around her age, had viewing appointments after hers.

“I went in, but it’s not the same apartment at all,” she told me. It was much smaller than it looked in the pictures. The kitchen sink was different. The stove was missing several knobs. There was no heater. “This is the idea of ​​the apartment we saw in the pictures,” she said. Then there was the apartment itself. “My friend said we should have known it was AI because there was a plant on the gas stove in the photo.”

New York City brokers have always had a knack for making even the most run-down apartments look acceptable in photos, but generative AI has given them the power to do it with the click of a button. For renters, this means spending more time sifting through each listing to avoid ending up in an apartment that looks much better online than it does in person.

Virtual staging isn’t new, but AI is. Bee, a Florida-based Realtor who asked that her last name be withheld for privacy reasons, said a virtual showing often helps people envision how they could refurnish or remodel a home. “You’d be surprised at how little creativity a buyer or renter has,” she said. “The price of a virtual stage show can range anywhere from, like, $40 to $400 depending on what these plays do, whereas a real-life stage show can’t be done for less than a few thousand.”

She showed me a photo from one of her active listings, a house with furniture she described as “antique.” The living room had plush sofas, an ornate wooden coffee table, a Persian-style rug, and heavy curtains. Then she showed me how she redecorated it using ChatGPT. The white sofa, track lighting, and simple woven rug were completely modern. She said the modified photo will not appear on the menu, but she is sharing it with customers to show how they can update the space.

Real estate agents and brokers have many virtual staging tools at their disposal. Bee’s favorites are Stuccco and BoxBrownie, both of which charge per menu. But Bee said there’s a difference between using virtual staging software to show what a home could look like with new furniture and some DIY upgrades, and using AI tools to create misleading listings. “There is a lawsuit waiting to happen,” she said. “I think ‘digitally modified’ is not accurate. I wouldn’t necessarily say ‘digitally modified’ if I had an AI to make the bed, but ‘digitally modified’ to me says: ‘I fixed a vulnerability.'”

Madison, a Queens resident, said she wants to start looking for apartments before her lease expires in the fall. During the six years she lived in New York, she found apartments through Facebook groups and, once, through a posting on the dating and classifieds app Lex. This time, she was searching StreetEasy, where she saw a slew of AI-powered listings.

“I think deceptive or misleading photos of apartments have been around as long as online apartment listings, but they’ve become really egregious now,” she said. Whereas pre-AI real estate scams involved photos of very different apartments, “Now I’m looking at a photo of a room that looks fairly real until you start looking at the details of the furniture and things like that, where they obviously took a photo of the actual room and said, ‘Hey, ChatGPT, can you put some furniture in this for me?’”

Some states have begun to crack down on AI-enhanced listings. New York recently implemented a law Enforce AI disclosure in advertisingBut legislation Focuses mostly on “artificial performers”, And not on furniture created by artificial intelligence. But the New York Secretary of State did Issue a warning last year regarding misleading listings created or enhanced by artificial intelligence, noting that brokers are already banned from posting dishonest advertising.

Recent ca Modified image law It goes so far as to require anyone advertising a property to disclose when AI has been used to alter or enhance images. But as with regulations for brokers and realtors, laws governing the use of AI in listings and other advertising vary from state to state.

Joyce, who found an apartment after searching for months, said even the descriptions appeared to be generated by artificial intelligence. “Everything is magical.” Everything is “warm”. “You notice the same wording patterns over and over again, where everything has ‘spa-like finishes,’” she said. “The brokers are already dishonest, and now they have it, like a lying machine in their pocket.”