AI is cursing 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’d be “hell.” After looking at a lot of tiny, overpriced places she described as “shitholes,” Joyce found her dream apartment: a reasonably priced studio in Manhattan. “It was big and airy, and there was a fireplace,” she said. The kitchen was small but well equipped and looked like it had 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 viewings scheduled after hers. “I get in, and 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 fireplace. “There’s the idea of the apartment that we saw in the pictures,” she said, and then there was the apartment itself. “My friend said we should’ve known it was AI because there was a plant on the gas stove in the picture.” New York City brokers have always had a knack for making even the most run-down apartments look passable in photos, but generative AI has given them the ability to do so with the click of a button. For renters, this means spending even more time scrutinizing every listing to avoid ending up in an apartment that looks far better online than it does in person. Virtual staging isn’t new, but AI is. …