"As netizens scoped out the listing on Google Street View, it soon became apparent that images of the house had been extensively doctored with AI. Gone were the shed dormer, the clean, freshly painted exterior. (There is a dormer, but it's gabled-i.e., a completely different shape.) Even the yard in the listing photo tapped into the uncanny: too green, flat, like an illustration."
"Over the last couple of years, a number of AI services such as virtualstagingai.app and the video generator AutoReel have infiltrated real estate for the same reason they have infiltrated every other creative industry: to undercut or eliminate the work of skilled laborers. Rather than liquidating photographers and stagers in one fell swoop, as Uber did for taxi drivers, however, the introduction of AI is merely accelerating a long-term labor trend in the real estate industry."
A Zillow listing in Detroit used AI to heavily alter exterior and interior photos, replacing a gabled dormer with a different shed dormer, smoothing paint, and creating an unnaturally vivid, flat yard. Street View comparison exposed the alterations and revealed the actual house as a fixer-upper with chipped paint, outdated aluminum-paned windows, and general wear. Interior shots carried an AI glow and haze, blending real and unreal into a slurry of ambiguity, of truth and lies. AI staging tools such as virtualstagingai.app and AutoReel are undercutting photographers and stagers and accelerating a long-term trend of agents cutting outside contractors to expand profits.
Read at The Nation
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