AI in Real Estate Creates Demonic Figure in Washington, D.C. Bathroom Listing Photo

Horror 'Demon' Appears in DC Real Estate Listing Photo

Real estate photos are meant to attract renters and buyers, but AI-generated images are misleading people and making horrific errors. Case in point: a Washington, D.C. listing featured a "demon" climbing out of a bathroom toilet. Futurism reports that a Redditor in D.C. scrolling through listings stumbled across the disturbing image that was featured on apartments.com and Redfin. "For just $1,800 a month you can have your own bathroom demon," the Redditor writes. The listing has since been pulled from apartments.com and the offending image has now been removed from Redfin. But the Wayback Machine saved a screenshot of the listing that featured a 'Bright MLS' watermark. There is no explanation as to how the strange image came to be but when it was cross-posted to r/weird another user shared a photo they had found on another listing that also shows some kind of mangled human form on top of a toilet. It's remarkable that these obvious errors weren't spotted before publishing. As PetaPixel reported last year, house hunters have begun to notice that real estate listings increasingly contain AI images and are calling them out for being misleading. There's even a term for it: 'housefishing'. A recent report from The Atlantic revealed that in a survey of realtors, 70 percent of them admitted to using AI. The driving force behind all of this is cost. "Why would I send my photos of an empty room to a virtual stager, have them spend four days and send it back to me at a charge of 500 bucks when I can just do it in ChatGPT for free in 45 seconds?" realtor Jason Haber told Wired last year. "We've done virtual renderings for 20 years, so the fact that you can just do it now on AI, there was a whole cottage industry of virtual renderings and those people are now looking for a new job." There are rules in place for real estate listings: the National Association of Realtors specifically prohibits the use of misleading images. But as with most areas, the law hasn't caught up to AI yet. Of course all of this is bad news for real estate photographers.

Realtor Uses AI, Accidentally Posts Photo of Rental Property With Demonic Figure Emerging From Mirror

"Genuinely the worst possible thing to scroll past before I fall asleep." The real estate industry has seized on generative AI with a passion. Realtors have made extensive use of the tech, manipulating photos of properties beyond recognition by giving facades and interiors a heavy coat of AI-generated paint. Text descriptions of properties have turned into a heap of ChatGPT-generated buzzwords, devolving an already frustrating house hunt into a genuinely exasperating experience. Making sense of what a rental apartment actually looks like in the real world has regressed into a guessing game. We've already come across bizarre listings of inexplicably yassified houses with smoothed-over architectural features, misplaced trees, nonsensically rearranged furniture, and mangled props. But now, a listing for a property in the Washington, DC area has taken the cake. Renters seeking a new home in the capital made a horrifying discovery while browsing listings: what can only be described as an Eldritch horror poking her disfigured head out -- from somehow both inside and outside -- of a bathroom mirror. In other words, it's the kind of nightmarish creature only a flawed AI algorithm could've cooked up -- and that only a time-strapped realtor could fail to notice before posting for the whole world to see. The listing for a property in Fort Totten, a suburb in northern DC, has since been taken down from Apartments.com. Other instances of the same listing still exist on other sites, such as Redfin, but no longer include the mangled picture of what one Reddit user described as their "sleep paralysis demon." Helpfully, the Internet Archive backed up a snapshot of the listing before it was pulled. "Genuinely the worst possible thing to scroll past before I fall asleep," one horrified user wrote. "That thing somehow struck raw primal fear in me at an unparalleled record high." The Zillow listing for the property includes what appears to be either the original or a differently edited photo of the same bathroom, suggesting the realtors may have attempted to edit out personal cosmetic items the previous renter had left behind on the vanity. Besides the nightmarish creature, a mysterious ottoman was added to the middle of the bathroom floor, strengthening the case that an AI tool was involved. "And then, for some reason, the AI added an uncanny valley blow-up doll reaching through the mirror for bathroom salad," one user wrote. Futurism has reached out to the real estate company behind the listing for comment. It's not even the first bathroom demon renters have come across lately. A separate Reddit user noticed what appears to be a miniaturized woman holding a smartphone disconcertingly crouched on the top of a toilet tank. "How do you not notice the melted demon crawling out of the wall before you hit publish?" one baffled user wrote, responding to the suggestion that AI image editing tools may have been involved. "That s*** made my stomach drop." Whether the image -- which includes a watermark for the cooperative realtor tool MLS but no indication that it was edited with AI -- broke any rules before it was taken down remains unclear, as rules can vary significantly. As Giraffe360, an AI image editing tool for real estate photos, points out on its website, MLS organizations "consistently prohibit" edits that remove or alter structural elements, erase or modify views, or digitally renovate or upgrade interiors or exteriors. "Here's a simple test: if an edit would require physical renovation to achieve in real life, it shouldn't be in an MLS listing photo," the website reads. Whether an Eldritch horror climbing out of a bathroom mirror requires a physical renovation remains unclear at best.