This is awesome! StreetEasy is how many New Yorkers find apartments. In the past few years, it has been flooded with AI-staged apartments. The AI stagings warp the room to fit furniture that would 100% certainly not fit there. It’s deceptive, and I’m glad it at least requires disclosure now (although I wish it were fully banned)
Not going to lie, I wish they also added a square footage as a legal requirement too.
It is entirely baffling to me as to why, but NYC is the only major city in the US I've ever lived in where it is genuinely a problem. In all other cities, I had no issues with that, pretty much every single posting online had square footage.
Meanwhile, on StreetEasy (and other platforms listing NYC rental units), looking for apartments is a major pain, because majority have zero square footage info. And then it turns into a pure guessing game that becomes super annoying, because an apartment I might be interested in is listed only as "1 bedroom", but just looking at the pics it is impossible to gauge whether it is 400sqft or 900sqft. Knowing that info would have made it much easier for renters, and I cannot think of a logical reason to not provide that information.
There is square footage on many NYC listings, but it’s wrong. They often have the square footage of the total area occupied by the apartment, including all the interior walls and columns that can take 20% of the area away.
I didn’t know the square footage of my apartment until I had built an app that utilizes LiDAR to actually measure it. Broker told me 650 square feet - it’s precisely 505 square feet.
(Won’t advertise my app, but you can find many on the iOS App Store).
Would be nice for StreetEasy to have some kind of third party verification about apartment size claims.
They mean the apartment building hallways and elevators. As in, if you summed the square footage of all the apartments on a floor, you'd get a number greater than the actual dimensions of the floor, because the common areas are counted multiple times.
> just looking at the pics it is impossible to gauge whether it is 400sqft or 900sqft
Those are not good pics. Probably* for the same reason, to hide size and maybe something else.
*Depends on culture and I don't know about NYC. I've seen another landlord's market where quite a few landlords just post one or two useless photos — and even heard advice to pay attention to such postings as they're definitely not prepared by a professional agent.
If it had a “good” square footage, it would be touted front and center. Because it’s not, you know it doesn’t.
I see this all the time with motorcycle PPE. If something was CE A, AA, or AAA rated, it’d be at the top of the description/specs. When it’s not, I know it’s not so I just move on.
I wish that e-bike ads had the classification. The bike classes are well-defined AFAIK - it's the class legality that's regional, if any. Right now, they're actively helping riders skirt/evade the laws.
I'm pretty sure if they stopped skirting the laws, it'd eliminate a decent cohort of their customer base. Watching someone come through a pedestrian area at 45 mph on a "bicycle" that clearly is an electric motorcycle is pretty interesting.
> I cannot think of a logical reason to not provide that information.
Because it's to an extreme degree a landlord's market and thus none of them have any incentive to do more than the bare minimum?
Even if it was listed everyone would "stretch" things by including closets and the like. The only way it would work is if the city did the measurements and maintained a database...but then you'd have people bribing the inspectors. they already do it over fire code.
Renting an apartment should require at a minimum registration, inspection (fire code - window/egress, detectors, and ideally an extinguisher and fire blanket), proof of insurance, and some sort of bond per unit that the city holds onto and uses for emergency code compliance repairs.
During the press conference he finished with a light joke that was something like “after all it’s meant to be Street Easy not Street Hard”. I assumed that was an app, your post unintentionally closed the loop for me!
Agree AI modified listing make no sense to allow; regulation here is making up for platform failure.
Apartment hunting is an unpleasant chore I haven’t had to do since 2022. It hadn’t even occurred to me that AI slop would be the norm. I really have lived to see man-made horrors beyond my comprehension.
I wish there would be a similar thing for food as well. In my country (Brazil), food apps such as iFood are FULL of AI images. Worse is that iFood don't allow reviews to post pictures, so you get very blind asking it.
Now Didi came (99) and Keeta, and they at least allow users to post reviews with pictures.
The Mayor is not a dictator and can't just make up laws or regulations.
He can probably get DCWP to engage in the normal rule making process, but at most this is probably going to get some AI disclosure somewhere, which is what we had for "virtually staged" lies.
Right, which is why all we're going to get it a label saying that AI was used (or maybe landlords will try to fly through on the label of "virtually staged" that they've been using).
Existing law doesn't have the authority to ban all AI images as inherently deceptive, and DCWP isn't going to be spending a bunch of time prosecuting individual images.
I agree with Mamdani that these images are often deceptive and misleading and sifting through the bullshit is annoying (and was annoying with virtually staged images too). It's just not going to go anywhere. The energy would be better spent on zoning and building code reform.
I am honestly so surprised that everyone on HN is so naive that they take political statements like this at face value.
Politicians routinely say they will do things they do not have the authority to do, and it's often very important to understanding what will actually happen to have some understanding of what authorities are available to them, or at the very least ask Google/LLMs about it.
I agree, we're going to get a little warning label, just like the "virtually staged" labels that are already there and nothing of consequence will actually change. That is why I say this is a nothing burger.
I strongly disagree. This is just the Politician's Fallacy.
I keep harping on about the "virtual staging" that real estate agents have been doing for a decade that is equally deceptive and annoying and already gets labeled, and the labels don't actually help because you're still left trying to decipher what is real yourself.
If they wanted to actually do something useful, they'd get together with the legislature and pass a law saying that real estate listings need to come with floor plans that are accurate within X% under the penalty of some sort of fine with a private right of action. But passing laws is hard and faces opposition.
Why are you so certain of this? Oh it was a problem before so we should just keep doing nothing even though it will almost certainly become exponentially worse with AI? Love this plan.
I am so certain of this because I was not born yesterday and this is not my first time paying attention to (NYC) politics.
Politician makes a grand statement they do not have the authority to meaningfully act on to get headlines, DCWP issues a weak sauce disclosure rule and the news cycle moves on because this is not actually anybody's priority.
If what ends up happening is that every listing has misleading AI photos but they have to disclose it, then also what ends up happening is nobody trusts them anymore. Consumers will know by default to not trust the photos.
In my eyes, thats a win since that's a better outcome than them secretly using AI photos.
Of course in my ideal world it would be outlawed altogether, But even if they were still allowed to use AI photos but were forced to disclose it, that's still a good first step.
Is your claim that every photo will be labeled as AI-modified, or that people won't label AI-modified images? If the latter, just penalize the listing agents. Trivial.
The entire issue is that the platforms are already inundated with misleading, unlabeled AI-modified images.
If that ends up happening, then the next step would be for the platform to derank listings that contain AI-enhanced photos, to set the proper incentive. That would be up to the platform to enforce, though.
What incentive does the platform have to do this? Ostensibly, the agents/landlords are the ones who pay, so you're asking the platform to bite the hands that feed it.
It's not "if." My mother-in-law is a realtor. She has a storage locker full of furniture for staging. I guarantee that the monthly cost of that locker, plus the cost of moving the furniture in and out of every property is an order of magnitude more expensive than whatever tool is doing the AI fake staging. The cost savings are too attractive.
The sites that do have cookie banners tend to be the unbearable websites with 500 adverts, a full screen modal asking to sign up to the newsletter and redirecting you 30 times because you scrolled and touched the wrong element.
> If the latter, just penalize the listing agents. Trivial.
It's very unlikely to be trivial though because the state typically lacks the resources required to enforce things like this at scale. You'll need to find violators, meet a burden of proof that they violated the law, notify them, give them the right to defend themsleves against the allegation, etc.
They'll almost certainly spend more time and money on the process than is ever collected if this ever happens.
> They'll almost certainly spend more time and money on the process than is ever collected if this ever happens.
The point of regulation isn't for the state to turn a profit. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that regulations that drive a monetary profit for the state are generally bad because they create a perverse incentive. For example, municipal governments adversely affect traffic flow by lowering speed limits because those lower speed limits generate more ticket revenue.
You're right that the point of regulation isn't to turn a "profit" but the laws of economics always apply. If you have a fine of $100 for a widespread practice that costs $1,000 to collect, the state isn't going to magically allocate resource to applying it.
You could create a private right of action for this, but that is its own bag of worms.
> municipal governments adversely affect traffic flow by lowering speed limits because those lower speed limits generate more ticket revenue.
I don't know about the US because the US is weird, but:
* at 30kmph the rate of fatalities in case of a car hitting a pedestrian is basically 0%, at 50kmph I think it's 5% or more
* at 30kmph collisions are much easier to avoid due to the increased reaction time and the decreased braking distance (I don't remember the exact numbers)
* at 30kmph you can hold a conversation at normal speech levels next to a moderately busy road, at 50kmph you will have to shout (and not even notice it due to the high ambient noise)
1. The point of laws is not to turn a profit on their enforcement
2. The burden of proof/right to defense/notifications etc are all quite a lot easier for licensed entities like real estate brokers – that's kind of the entire point of licensure
No? There are many things you are not allowed to say when advertising, many ways in which you are not allowed to advertise. Fraud is not legal, and I have yet to see anyone make a free speech case for it.
There's a whole spectrum of things built into phone cameras these days like color correction and edge/sharpness enhancement where whether or not it's advertised as "AI" comes down to marketing.
Not that I like the idea of it, but I could see adding furniture to empty apartment photos. A furnished apartment probably sells better than an empty one.
Apartment advertisements are already doing this. With the caveat that the sense of scale (and literally everything about the apartment space tbh) can be entirely tampered with.
Oh yeah, this tiny apartment can definitely fit all this furniture. It’s not all ai generated at 2/3rds the size of any real furniture.
And photos of a furnished property give a better sense of the size of the space, and what can be done with it, than photos of empty rooms. (So long as the furnishings are sized realistically, of course.)
Generative features are all over Photoshop and other image editors. Removing a coffee cup off a table is a pretty small use of AI that nobody would really object to
Ethical edits would be stuff you couldn't notice in the inspection. The coffee cup is fine because in the inspection that won't be there and isn't a part of the property anyway. If you use AI to remove the rust and calcium on the taps that is something you can inspect and prove was modified in a misleading way.
I am a big supporter of AI and use it heavily. I agree with this. It's not about AI at all. It's about a blanket ban to prevent deceit when selling a product or service. It should be depicted as it is. AI just lowers the barrier for deceit (unfortunately), but it's not the only tool that can be used towards that end. Ban all deceitful advertising.
I think advertising can be done right. Stack Overflow seems to have gotten it right, so much so that I disabled my adblocker for them. What bites me is when the advertisements are for something toward my caveman brain, like being advertised alcohol products while scrolling through instagram. I'd like the ability to say: "yes tell me about the newest raspberry pi products, but don't keep advertising gambling services".
Perhaps we need OP to explain "I fully trust AI with these things", because it is difficult to define trust in this sense. Yes of course the human motivation was always going to be the real "AI threat", and fraud (and a hugely increased spam volume) was always going to be the main route of AI damage to society.
Most real estate listing using a type of "HDR" exposure stacking due to the difficulty in taking photos of rooms that exposure the interior correctly and also expose the view from the windows in the same photo. It doesn't show things that aren't there, and personally I see it as acceptable, but I could see some law accidentally making it illegal.
Obviously not, though they may count as misleading image manipulation, and should be similarly regulated. The problem is subjectivity - AI is just a convenient bright line with an easy definition.
I'm sure soon enough dating apps will get smart and instead of the "you have no matches" they will make some fake AI matches so you have a feeling that something is happening and you have a chance of actually meeting someone.
Advertising would be fine if they checked it. Food advertising has used fake images forever, but it's okay because you know the meatballs don't look like that. You have an idea of what warm fries taste like without the fake heat imagery.
But the dress you get is not the same as the dress in the picture. If the model looked like you, the dress should fit the same, but the AI dresses don't. Same figure, same skin color, same height, and yet the dress looks different.
That's the problem with homes. There's no way a room fits that many things but AI will make it look like it does. There's a distortion where it changes the specification entirely.
It's like showing someone playing Fallout 4 on a MacBook Air. It's a deceptive practice, unlike the cereal boxes showing milk.
> Food advertising has used fake images forever, but it's okay because you know the meatballs don't look like that.
Highly disagree. Color retouch or ambience or effects, sure. But changing shape, size, base color and perhaps some other things is deceit. Japan can do this, other countries should able too
Because every time something new comes along, people will push boundaries while arguing it is acceptable. In this case, they may argue that it is no different from physically furnishing an apartment, taking some photos, then removing the furniture. At least in terms of representing the product. Clearly using AI is much easier and cheaper than physically furnishing the apartment for a couple of hours. Some may even genuinely believe this, seeing it as more a tool of convenience than something that doesn't always represent physical reality.
That doesn't answer the question. If you used photoshop's content-aware fill (introduced over a decade ago) to hide imperfections in your apartment, that would still be deceptive advertising. Moreover it's almost as easy as asking AI to do it, so the "AI makes everything easier" excuse doesn't work either.
I think the reason is clear. Politicians love to enact bills for already illegal things, but tailored for the current thing. In this case, it's AI, which there's bipartisan opposition. It makes them look responsive to their constituents and requires no political capital, because it's uncontroversial.
The whole point of staging furniture is to help visualize and contextualize. Seeing a staged bed, couch, coffee table etc gives you a picture of how large or cramped the room is. AI furniture in contrast isn't limited by physics or reality and does not assist in showing the size of a room. It's only purpose is to deceive the viewer.
AR visualizations where virtual models that are true to real world furniture is much more acceptable.
I would personally love to see an end to the universally existing bait-and-switch of brokers listing unavailable units just to get you on the phone, then when you contact them, saying "Oh sorry that unit just got rented (or sold), but, I have another one that might suit you"
AI “virtual” staged images are reasonably common on UK property websites now but they have to be labelled, it seems: probably advertising standards rules.
This is a frustrating trend with real estate agents on their MLS pictures. Sure, they have a disclaimer (most of the time) but at a thumbnail size as the lead image, it’s not possible to see it’s AI. Which leads to clicking on a complete BS listing.
Or we could have our politicians and laws actually work for us. You should straight up be able to collect a bounty if you visit a property inspection and show the online photos are fake.
It's exactly because there are laws against deceptive advertising that Mamdani can enact theses rules.
NYC's Administrative Code prohibits deceptive trade practices, false advertising, misleading representations made to customers, etc. It gives the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection authority to execute those broad guidelines by enacting specific rules.
So Mamdani and the DCWP are basically saying, "City law gives us the authority to regulate this sort of thing, and because this is clearly in violation, here are the specific rules we're enacting to regulate it."
Facebook marketplace driving me crazy lately. A lot of people post photos of antiques and other furniture with obvious AI staging. It’s hard to tell what is real and what isn’t. At least there I can just demand the normal photos. I know that isn’t the case with most rentals in NYC because it’s super competitive and already gated in ridiculous ways with brokers and real estate agents.
Given that this would be the first ever law with any degree of ambiguity ever created, we should create some type of like... room... maybe call it a "court"... where people could "judge" whether a person fell on the allowable or disallowable end of the spectrum
It's a groundbreaking idea but it might work. And who knows, maybe it's an innovation we could apply to other areas of law in case they also ever need to interact with any ambiguity (which hasn't happened yet, of course).
no, the photos you take with the lenses on your phone are not AI generated. They are generated from the sensors on your phone.
Have you seen some of these listings? We are talking about retaining walls invented where they can’t exist, work displayed that hasn’t occurred, etc. if you show up to a property and it’s materially different than the picture that got you there, that should be illegal.
If you want to make an argument that “everything is AI now” go for it. But I’m happy to see existing false advertising laws evolve as technology evolves
iPhones use a variety of AI (though not LLM) techniques every time you take a photo. For example they use semantic segmentation where they recognize different aspects of a photo (faces, skies, skin tones, etc) and process them differently
Android phones sure. The iPhone as far as I have seen has stayed away from gimmicks and AI. "Computational photography" is a long shot away from AI generated images. Everything in the iphone photo actually existed much the same as the photo shows, it's just exposure and color being messed with.
If you use post editing tools like magic eraser and the new reframe / expand tools then that's a different story and shouldn't be allowed in real estate photography.
If you take a photo of your apartment does your iPhone automatically make it twice the size, add modern renovations, paint the walls and add all new furnishings?
What’s the point though? To save prospective renters time?
I’ve lived here for 30+ years, rented for more than 20 and why would anyone ever rent an apartment without seeing it in person?
That being said, IANAL but I imagine the rule is fully legal. The city already mandates a host of things: if the listing markets something as a 3BR, it needs to have 3 rooms bigger than 80 sq feet, each with an exterior window. If they say 3BR and it needs a wall to created the 3rd BR they have to put it up. If it says 2BR convertible 3BR, you might have to pay to have it put up.
Students, out of state, and other groups may sign a lease sight unseen. Yeah its dumb but it does happen. Yes there is -some- reasonable assumption of risk, but not to the extent to allow blatant deceptive advertising.
A real estate photographer described the typical job as taking 15 photos of the same living room while moving a softbox around and then merging the layers in Photoshop. No Photoshop would be like no copy pasting permitted while writing code.
Using AI for these pics is also not inherently deceptive though.
I live in an extremely overheated housing market where properties are usually sold/rented long before they actually get completed. I'm fine with landlords using AI in their renders to make claims about how the place will eventually look.
You also see people using AI to put furniture into the image (I assume they are also taking out the furniture that's actually there, belonging to the previous tenant, but doesn't fit their desired aesthetic). Again, nothing _inherently_ deceptive about this.
Main thing is just whether tenants are empowered to back out of the contract if they don't get what they were promised.
Anyone who e.g. uses AI to expand rooms/windows... Jail please.
Why not just put the floor plan with no photos then, or just photos of an empty room with white walls? I can imagine myself how a room _could_ look, what added value does your imagined version add?
It works because they are allowed to by the state, by a process specified by the state. The rules and ordinances of a county or municipality are subordinate to the laws of the state that granted them existence in the first place. There's a lot variety in "by a process specified by the state", which results in different structures: commissions, charters, mayoralties with councils, and more.
This likely doesn't even require a new law. There is probably an existing law against deceptive advertising in renting. This is just the mayor announcing that he will interpret the existing law to cover AI generated staging images.
well, reading the article Mamdani is cracking down on "deceptive landlord practices" thus it means his administration will apply deceptive landlord practice laws to use of AI images in advertising apartments. At some point if somebody wants to fight the issue they can take it to court.
As a general rule you probably don't need new laws to penalize behavior you think should be penalized, there are more than enough laws where a good faith interpretation would fit.
I think it is basically just signaling to the county DA's as to what they ought to consider when seeking out blatant cases of rental fraud; the laws already exist in the deceptive practices code...
I think an actual law does have to be passed to enact the part literally banning all AI imagery on a five boroughs basis, as opposed to just penalizing inaccurate AI genned imagery... which afaik is municipality based. Pretty sure the City Council needs to codify that.
Not sure who would be responsible for enforcing it on pretty much every site in the world that isn't just the real estate broker or building management/etc, though. Would places like rent.com be legally responsible?
I'm not sure why you're downvoted. Many cities have a housing department and they can write and update regulations and requirements (within the scope of their legislatively-granted authority) that have the force of law. Things get set up this way so legislative bodies don't have to write and vote on every detail of every rule.
It's possible someone might challenge a rule if they think it oversteps the authority granted.
yeah me neither, maybe it was using the phrase good faith.
I suppose landlords if they think it is very beneficial to use AI to get people to pay more for apartments might fight back, probably free speech or some such thing, some landlords might just do it because they dislike Mamdani.
Anyway I'm not sure if they would need to update much, just issue statement "using AI to create an image that cannot actually happen in reality for an apartment by.. (long winded description follows) is obviously deceptive and falls under current regulations and laws and we will be prosecuting it as such" - this would of course be determined by how things work in NY specifically.
I am not a lawyer, but this seems unlikely. Federal law prohibits "false advertisement" which is understood to include misleading advertisements. Regulators can and do restrict certain types of commercial speech, and this kind of restriction has survived First Amendment challenge.
False advertising does not have first amendment protection, surely. And requiring potentially misleading AI images to be labelled surely doesn’t infringe.
I think this could be something where the middle ground is the best option, this being, just make the rule that any listing with a picture that includes GenAI must also include the original un-AI’d photo right before it. This allows the lister to present the place as it is (important to the renter) and how it could be (important to the lister). I don’t think everything needs to be black and white
I'm assuming "AI images" means realtors using AI to stage empty rooms with furniture.
I'm honestly fine with that as long as it's labeled.
Having just done an apartment search a few months ago, AI staged images are surprisingly good quality. It's difficult to detect it as AI when going through a bunch of listings quickly. But yea, I guess it can cause confusion if it sticks a Peloton (or whatever) in a space where it won't actually fit.
I just moved into a new apartment and tried using AI for layout inspiration. Every single attempt expanded the room, shrunk furniture, and even changed where walls were.
Landlords should not be using tools to stage units, it's going to lead to false expectations on the size of apartments.
There are software tools made specifically for staging (and de-staging!) real estate photos. I don't know if they're using off-the-shelf image models or not, but they have capabilities like restricting changes to specific regions of the image which aren't available in services like ChatGPT.
(De-staging is a particularly neat trick - if a property still has some of the current tenant's belongings in it, an AI model can remove those items to show what the room would look like empty.)
Yeah. With CAD models, every single trick I have tried to make photo mock-ups with an AI image-to-image conversion, whether using a line art or canny edge detector or just a shaded source object, has seen the AI ultimately ignore the cues in some generations, no matter what I do, and I would expect it to work a lot better with room photography.
In the 1960s Campbells Soup got in trouble with the FTC for using marbles to raise the ingredients and make the soup look fuller than it was. This was the real standard for deceptive advertising.
I dont care about simulating furniture placement specifically, but most use of AI in advertising that I see today would not be acceptable under that standard.
AI images being able to deceive you isn’t justification, if anything it’s the opposite. The staged furniture is there to help you visualise the size of the room. While AI furniture tricks you while not accurately representing the room size and layout.
It is entirely baffling to me as to why, but NYC is the only major city in the US I've ever lived in where it is genuinely a problem. In all other cities, I had no issues with that, pretty much every single posting online had square footage.
Meanwhile, on StreetEasy (and other platforms listing NYC rental units), looking for apartments is a major pain, because majority have zero square footage info. And then it turns into a pure guessing game that becomes super annoying, because an apartment I might be interested in is listed only as "1 bedroom", but just looking at the pics it is impossible to gauge whether it is 400sqft or 900sqft. Knowing that info would have made it much easier for renters, and I cannot think of a logical reason to not provide that information.
(Won’t advertise my app, but you can find many on the iOS App Store).
Would be nice for StreetEasy to have some kind of third party verification about apartment size claims.
Personally, I wish we would normalize including exact floor plans with measurements.
Those are not good pics. Probably* for the same reason, to hide size and maybe something else.
*Depends on culture and I don't know about NYC. I've seen another landlord's market where quite a few landlords just post one or two useless photos — and even heard advice to pay attention to such postings as they're definitely not prepared by a professional agent.
The reason is simple. Omission is deception.
I see this all the time with motorcycle PPE. If something was CE A, AA, or AAA rated, it’d be at the top of the description/specs. When it’s not, I know it’s not so I just move on.
Because it's to an extreme degree a landlord's market and thus none of them have any incentive to do more than the bare minimum?
Even if it was listed everyone would "stretch" things by including closets and the like. The only way it would work is if the city did the measurements and maintained a database...but then you'd have people bribing the inspectors. they already do it over fire code.
Renting an apartment should require at a minimum registration, inspection (fire code - window/egress, detectors, and ideally an extinguisher and fire blanket), proof of insurance, and some sort of bond per unit that the city holds onto and uses for emergency code compliance repairs.
okay let's change that? seems bad
Agree AI modified listing make no sense to allow; regulation here is making up for platform failure.
Now Didi came (99) and Keeta, and they at least allow users to post reviews with pictures.
This has also been a problem long before AI with "virtually staged" apartments.
Landlords in nyc are doing business in nyc, which means the city can regulate them, does it not?
He can probably get DCWP to engage in the normal rule making process, but at most this is probably going to get some AI disclosure somewhere, which is what we had for "virtually staged" lies.
Existing law doesn't have the authority to ban all AI images as inherently deceptive, and DCWP isn't going to be spending a bunch of time prosecuting individual images.
I agree with Mamdani that these images are often deceptive and misleading and sifting through the bullshit is annoying (and was annoying with virtually staged images too). It's just not going to go anywhere. The energy would be better spent on zoning and building code reform.
you've constructed a false dichotomy here.
the government of a city with ~8 million people is capable of doing multiple things at the same time.
Similarly, it's fine for people to have opinions on food, dental hygiene, and the tax code without being a chef, a dentist, and an accountant.
And in my understanding interpreting the law as opposed to just reciting it constitutes legal advice.
Politicians routinely say they will do things they do not have the authority to do, and it's often very important to understanding what will actually happen to have some understanding of what authorities are available to them, or at the very least ask Google/LLMs about it.
Your argument works both ways; without direct observation you cannot be sure they did nothing
Cat is neither dead or alive
Degrees of alteration matter, pretending ai images are the same as color retouching is dumb.
I keep harping on about the "virtual staging" that real estate agents have been doing for a decade that is equally deceptive and annoying and already gets labeled, and the labels don't actually help because you're still left trying to decipher what is real yourself.
If they wanted to actually do something useful, they'd get together with the legislature and pass a law saying that real estate listings need to come with floor plans that are accurate within X% under the penalty of some sort of fine with a private right of action. But passing laws is hard and faces opposition.
It doesn't really touch the issue of affordable housing so there's not much to cheer for here.
Politician makes a grand statement they do not have the authority to meaningfully act on to get headlines, DCWP issues a weak sauce disclosure rule and the news cycle moves on because this is not actually anybody's priority.
> Mayor Mamdani Says Landlords Can’t Secretly Use AI Images to Advertise Properties
The article contents align with the real title: you just disclose AI usage when advertising rentals.
If what ends up happening is that every listing has misleading AI photos but they have to disclose it, then also what ends up happening is nobody trusts them anymore. Consumers will know by default to not trust the photos.
In my eyes, thats a win since that's a better outcome than them secretly using AI photos.
Of course in my ideal world it would be outlawed altogether, But even if they were still allowed to use AI photos but were forced to disclose it, that's still a good first step.
Is your claim that every photo will be labeled as AI-modified, or that people won't label AI-modified images? If the latter, just penalize the listing agents. Trivial.
The entire issue is that the platforms are already inundated with misleading, unlabeled AI-modified images.
Just like every Web site has a cookie warning.
It's very unlikely to be trivial though because the state typically lacks the resources required to enforce things like this at scale. You'll need to find violators, meet a burden of proof that they violated the law, notify them, give them the right to defend themsleves against the allegation, etc.
They'll almost certainly spend more time and money on the process than is ever collected if this ever happens.
The point of regulation isn't for the state to turn a profit. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that regulations that drive a monetary profit for the state are generally bad because they create a perverse incentive. For example, municipal governments adversely affect traffic flow by lowering speed limits because those lower speed limits generate more ticket revenue.
You could create a private right of action for this, but that is its own bag of worms.
I don't know about the US because the US is weird, but:
* at 30kmph the rate of fatalities in case of a car hitting a pedestrian is basically 0%, at 50kmph I think it's 5% or more
* at 30kmph collisions are much easier to avoid due to the increased reaction time and the decreased braking distance (I don't remember the exact numbers)
* at 30kmph you can hold a conversation at normal speech levels next to a moderately busy road, at 50kmph you will have to shout (and not even notice it due to the high ambient noise)
Etc.
2. The burden of proof/right to defense/notifications etc are all quite a lot easier for licensed entities like real estate brokers – that's kind of the entire point of licensure
Oh yeah, this tiny apartment can definitely fit all this furniture. It’s not all ai generated at 2/3rds the size of any real furniture.
Generative features are all over Photoshop and other image editors. Removing a coffee cup off a table is a pretty small use of AI that nobody would really object to
I say that as an AI maximalist: I fully trust AI with these things. I do not trust the humans using the AI.
That's called catfishing.
But the dress you get is not the same as the dress in the picture. If the model looked like you, the dress should fit the same, but the AI dresses don't. Same figure, same skin color, same height, and yet the dress looks different.
That's the problem with homes. There's no way a room fits that many things but AI will make it look like it does. There's a distortion where it changes the specification entirely.
It's like showing someone playing Fallout 4 on a MacBook Air. It's a deceptive practice, unlike the cereal boxes showing milk.
Highly disagree. Color retouch or ambience or effects, sure. But changing shape, size, base color and perhaps some other things is deceit. Japan can do this, other countries should able too
It feels like this is already a whole thing that should already be solved.
I think the reason is clear. Politicians love to enact bills for already illegal things, but tailored for the current thing. In this case, it's AI, which there's bipartisan opposition. It makes them look responsive to their constituents and requires no political capital, because it's uncontroversial.
AR visualizations where virtual models that are true to real world furniture is much more acceptable.
We should simply not let people do fraud. Some of the oldest laws define weight and measures for this reason.
It sounds like an incredibly sensible rule. But is this something a mayor can just declare? Isn't this something aa legislative body has to decide?
NYC's Administrative Code prohibits deceptive trade practices, false advertising, misleading representations made to customers, etc. It gives the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection authority to execute those broad guidelines by enacting specific rules.
So Mamdani and the DCWP are basically saying, "City law gives us the authority to regulate this sort of thing, and because this is clearly in violation, here are the specific rules we're enacting to regulate it."
But it's refreshing to see common-sense policies being implemented.
Like another comment posted: platform failures need higher-level (govt. in this case) intervention.
And he only seems to be calling for disclosure, which isn't worth a damn, and can be put into some nearly unreadable print.
So realtor websites will get a tiny footer saying "image experience may be enhanced with AI"
(note my skilled use of "may" which actually means "are always 100% of the time"... ugh i hate it so much)
It's a groundbreaking idea but it might work. And who knows, maybe it's an innovation we could apply to other areas of law in case they also ever need to interact with any ambiguity (which hasn't happened yet, of course).
Have you seen some of these listings? We are talking about retaining walls invented where they can’t exist, work displayed that hasn’t occurred, etc. if you show up to a property and it’s materially different than the picture that got you there, that should be illegal.
If you want to make an argument that “everything is AI now” go for it. But I’m happy to see existing false advertising laws evolve as technology evolves
Unless you take into account their editing features that allow you to, for example, remove a human from an image
If you use post editing tools like magic eraser and the new reframe / expand tools then that's a different story and shouldn't be allowed in real estate photography.
I’ve lived here for 30+ years, rented for more than 20 and why would anyone ever rent an apartment without seeing it in person?
That being said, IANAL but I imagine the rule is fully legal. The city already mandates a host of things: if the listing markets something as a 3BR, it needs to have 3 rooms bigger than 80 sq feet, each with an exterior window. If they say 3BR and it needs a wall to created the 3rd BR they have to put it up. If it says 2BR convertible 3BR, you might have to pay to have it put up.
Where I live even using Photoshop for real estate advertisements is illegal, nevermind AI.
Using AI for these pics is also not inherently deceptive though.
I live in an extremely overheated housing market where properties are usually sold/rented long before they actually get completed. I'm fine with landlords using AI in their renders to make claims about how the place will eventually look.
You also see people using AI to put furniture into the image (I assume they are also taking out the furniture that's actually there, belonging to the previous tenant, but doesn't fit their desired aesthetic). Again, nothing _inherently_ deceptive about this.
Main thing is just whether tenants are empowered to back out of the contract if they don't get what they were promised.
Anyone who e.g. uses AI to expand rooms/windows... Jail please.
This likely doesn't even require a new law. There is probably an existing law against deceptive advertising in renting. This is just the mayor announcing that he will interpret the existing law to cover AI generated staging images.
As a general rule you probably don't need new laws to penalize behavior you think should be penalized, there are more than enough laws where a good faith interpretation would fit.
I think an actual law does have to be passed to enact the part literally banning all AI imagery on a five boroughs basis, as opposed to just penalizing inaccurate AI genned imagery... which afaik is municipality based. Pretty sure the City Council needs to codify that.
Not sure who would be responsible for enforcing it on pretty much every site in the world that isn't just the real estate broker or building management/etc, though. Would places like rent.com be legally responsible?
It's possible someone might challenge a rule if they think it oversteps the authority granted.
I suppose landlords if they think it is very beneficial to use AI to get people to pay more for apartments might fight back, probably free speech or some such thing, some landlords might just do it because they dislike Mamdani.
Anyway I'm not sure if they would need to update much, just issue statement "using AI to create an image that cannot actually happen in reality for an apartment by.. (long winded description follows) is obviously deceptive and falls under current regulations and laws and we will be prosecuting it as such" - this would of course be determined by how things work in NY specifically.
A number of them through the 50-80s plainly state publics right to truth trumps broadcasters and corporate right to lie
Just a taste of how off their nut the current right wing court is
We love restricting our enemies, but there are better ways.
I propose banning rent at all!
Zillow quotes: "The average rent for all bedrooms and all property types in New York, NY is $3,710."
Where are your figures sourced from?
I'm honestly fine with that as long as it's labeled.
Having just done an apartment search a few months ago, AI staged images are surprisingly good quality. It's difficult to detect it as AI when going through a bunch of listings quickly. But yea, I guess it can cause confusion if it sticks a Peloton (or whatever) in a space where it won't actually fit.
Landlords should not be using tools to stage units, it's going to lead to false expectations on the size of apartments.
(De-staging is a particularly neat trick - if a property still has some of the current tenant's belongings in it, an AI model can remove those items to show what the room would look like empty.)
Which meant you could toggle between the staged and unstaged photo. I didn’t notice any warping or distortion.
I dont care about simulating furniture placement specifically, but most use of AI in advertising that I see today would not be acceptable under that standard.