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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
AI “virtual” staged images are reasonably common on UK property websites now but they have to be labelled, it seems: probably advertising standards rules.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
> and I cannot think of a logical reason to not provide that information.
The reason is simple. Omission is deception.
No value is essentially "smaller than you would find acceptable."
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 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.
It's super annoying, but this is a total nothing burger because he doesn't actually have any power to do anything here.
This has also been a problem long before AI with "virtually staged" apartments.
> he doesn't actually have any power to do anything here.
Landlords in nyc are doing business in nyc, which means the city can regulate them, does it not?
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.
It’s directing the city to treat it as false advertising in existing law if I understand correctly
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 take it you are a lawyer specializing in NY real estate law, then? Would be interesting to hear a more detailed analysis if so.
The law applies to everyone, so it's reasonable for everyone to try to understand it, not just attorneys.
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.
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.
HN title is missing the operative word "secretly". The real title:
> 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.
That kind of regulation has failed over and over. The obvious outcome is that every listing will have misleading AI "photos".
Define "failed".
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.
What?
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.
Every photo will be AI-enhanced and correctly labeled as such.
Just like every Web site has a cookie warning.
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.
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.
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.
If platform cared they would have fixed problems already.
The platform can't fix what the platform is unaware of.
Analysis on steam shows not all games have the AI tag, and games which do sell measurably worse.
This site doesn't. Many don't.
so therefore don't create laws or pass city ordinances? I don't understand your logic.
If you want a particular outcome, legislate that outcome.
> 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.
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
Please offer proof of that obviously false claim.
And? Anything else and it would be a first amendment violation.
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.
Come on, there is no such thing as "trace amounts of AI" in a photo of a building.
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.)
A floor plan with dimensions does that better. That should be mandatory for listings.
Yeah the wrong sizing is my main problem, I dont even care about minor cosmetic issues like wrong paint on a photo if its still size accurate.
You’ve clearly not used photoshop recently, hey?
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
There's several other areas that would be good to categorically ban AI usage from:
It shouldn't even be controversial that this would be broadly good for society.I say that as an AI maximalist: I fully trust AI with these things. I do not trust the humans using the AI.
You trust AI with dating?
They said to ban AI usage in dating (sites, I assume)?
And then immediately wrote “I fully trust AI with these things”
But also wrote that he didn’t trust the humans behind the AI.
Nobody said that he did
Must be a politician
Maybe his taste in partners is just that bad
Does basic photoshop count as AI usage...? What about changing color balance, dynamic range, etc?
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.
You want the government to monitor people's profiles on dating apps? The ministry of dating photos
No but we used to call that “photoshopping an image” for a reason, especially when done to an extreme.
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.
Isn’t the more thorough solution banning deceptive product advertising?
It feels like this is already a whole thing that should already be solved.
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.
AI “virtual” staged images are reasonably common on UK property websites now but they have to be labelled, it seems: probably advertising standards rules.
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.
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.
At some point I hope we as a society stop trusting anything we see online. It's fake, slop, generated bullshit in most cases and only getting worse.
you know what they say about stopped clocks
Wasn't that already implicitly the case? Aren't there laws against deceptive advertising?
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?
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."
Without any consequences, it will just go on as before.
And he only seems to be calling for disclosure, which isn't worth a damn, and can be put into some nearly unreadable print.
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.
Doesn't this already fall under consumer protection laws? False advertisement & consumer fraud.
It does. This isn't new laws, it's an application of existing law on this practice.
Consumer protections aren't as fundamental and straightforward in the USA compared to most of the developed world.
I'm generally a fan of laissez-faire.
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.
i love this rule, but then again everything i agree with is 'common sense' to me!
Hopefully that will serve as a virtuous example.
Wait, this seems to be just about _disclosing_ the use of AI?
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)
Please pass that law in France too.
Are protections really this weak in New York?
Where I live even using Photoshop for real estate advertisements is illegal, nevermind AI.
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.
Requiring disclosure seems obvious.
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?
Shit, we're still doing photos? Do a video, make a gaussian splat of it, and do virtual walkthroughs. matterport but for cheap.
How does this work? Seems more like a law but cities dont have legislatures. Or … ?
Cities in the US can pass laws. They're called local ordinances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_ordinance#United_States
And the mayor just writes them?
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.
Cities have city councils that pass laws.
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.
Isn't literally every photograph taken with a modern iPhone technically an "AI-generated / AI-edited image"?
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
They do a sort of automatic Lightroom edit playing with colors, shadows and masking. They do not invent things that do not exist.
They absolutely do — see https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/samsung-galaxys-beloved-m...
It's not as simple a question as you make it sound: https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/how-galaxy...
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?
Yep. Most phones are doing computational photography mining images creating things that never where quite there.
Does your iPhone edit the image such that it’s substantially deceptive regarding the quality of the apartment to a reasonable person?
How often would you say you prompt your camera to líe about you in a bid to rent yourself
Is that not analogous to putting up a facetuned image on a dating profile?
Yes clearly that is what is meant here.
Mamdani will be sued. It's a 1st amendment issue.
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
That's actually more aggressive than the rule as it exists, which merely requires that AI-modified listing photos be labeled as such.
Love the guy but let’s try something that doesn’t restrict freedom of the press!
We love restricting our enemies, but there are better ways.
I propose banning rent at all!
Freezes rents but not taxes. Landlords take inventory offline. Studios at $5500. 1 beds at $7500. Yea, he's a real genius of his own mind.
> Studios at $5500. 1 beds at $7500.
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 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.)
The listings I saw with AI staging usually alternated photos, 1 photo unstaged, the next photo staged.
Which meant you could toggle between the staged and unstaged photo. I didn’t notice any warping or distortion.
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.
I would love to see that statement backed up with data. If you look at the other comments they are talking about more than just furniture
Yeah on second read I realize my comment was unclear; I don’t think this is okay. Fixed.
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.