Real Estate Is Entering Its AI Slop Era

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: As you're hunting through real estate listings for a new home in Franklin, Tennessee, you come across a vertical video showing off expansive rooms featuring a four-poster bed, a fully stocked wine cellar, and a soaking tub. In the corner of the video, a smiling real estate agent narrates the walk-through of your dream home in a soothing tone. It looks perfect -- maybe a little too perfect. The catch? Everything in the video isAI-generated. The real property is completely empty, and the luxury furniture is a product of virtual staging. The realtor's voice-over and expressions were born from text prompts. Even the camera's slow pan over each room is orchestrated by AI, because there was no actual video camera involved.

Any real estate agent can create 'exactly that, at home, in minutes,' says Alok Gupta, a former product manager at Facebook and software engineer at Snapchat who cofounded AutoReel, an app that allows realtors to turn images from their property listings into videos. He said that between 500 and 1,000 new listing videos are being created with AutoReel every day, with realtors across the US and even in New Zealand and India using the technology to market thousands of properties. This is one of many AI tools, including more familiar ones like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, that are quickly reshaping the real estate industry into something that isn't necessarily, well, real. 'People that want to buy a house, they're going to make the largest investment of their lifetime,' said Nathan Cool, a real estate photographer who runs an educational YouTube channel. 'They don't want to be fooled before they ever arrive.'

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