We are slowly reaching the point where we have to pay attention to whether apartment listings used AI – or didn’t.
Picture this: it’s late at night, and you’re scrolling through rental photos, trying to find a new place among grand, overproduced images and aggressively cheerful descriptions. This one’s too small. This one’s too expensive. But this one looks promising. You zoom in on the bathroom to check the size – full tub, built-in units, and whoops: there’s an AI-generated demon in the frame. A Reddit user says they spotted the photo while browsing rental listings, and the longer you stare at it, the more you realize something is off in just about every possible way.
Try, for a second, to ignore the multi-limbed nightmare that looks like it’s crawling through impossible wall geometry. Once you start examining the image properly, the telltale artifacts stack up – the kind that only our not-so-intelligent “artificial intelligence” friend tends to leave behind. Look at the pattern on the pillow awkwardly perched on a box in the middle of the floor: the print’s backside is warped and smeared. Or the object on top of the toilet tank. From a distance it resembles hand soap, but up close it turns into a vague approximation of “soap” – the kind of thing you’d expect if you’d had one beer too many and the room was spinning. Then there’s the toilet paper roll on the left, floating at an absurd angle like it forgot how gravity works.
We’d argue even the best artists on Phasmophobia couldn’t come up with something this unpleasant. And yes, we live in a world where AI image generation is getting better and better at convincing us that fake pictures are real – but it’s oddly reassuring to see it can still mess up badly enough to trigger that immediate “oh, come on” reaction.
It does make you wonder if the rental agent is sitting there, trying to work out why the place isn’t moving. Is it the price? The location? Local market conditions? Or the fact that the bathroom comes with an extra, AI-invented horror show?
