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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.

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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.
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I think that should be illegal and misrepresenting. Lots of gray area with AI usage.
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Why should that be illegal? It’s multiplying the productivity of our economy, instead of someone having to waste time and money making the apartment actually look like that, you can just generate an image of it, that’s massive productivity boost with no harm done to the final product, unless the tenant cares about the slippage between a generated image of an apartment that looks nice and an apartment that’s actually nice.

And plus thats time the real estate agent could have spent prompting claude to cure cancer so its a double win

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What, after all, is a bit of light fraud, if it saves an estate agent some time?
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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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I think their last sentence is a pretty clear indicator that they were not being serious.
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As with bitcoin fans before them, Poe's Law is in full effect with the AI boosters.
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Wouldn't that fall under existing false advertising laws, if you're putting fake/altered images in the listing?
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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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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 ;(

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How is that borderline, that’s just actual fraud.
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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)

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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.
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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)

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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.
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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.

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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?
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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.
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