https://lewisbrisbois.com/insights/clientalerts/new-californ...
https://dre.ca.gov/Licensees/Advisories/Advisory_2026_03_17_...
Edit: also if it becomes a big problem, in the future the law could be changed so that the real estate agent becomes liable to cover the cost of upgrading the property to match the altered image.
And plus thats time the real estate agent could have spent prompting claude to cure cancer so its a double win
I don't particularly mind fake furniture, but if it's very much not to scale I think it's pushing "probably fraud". And when permanent fixtures are fabricated, "blatant fraud, penalize immediately, revoke license on repeats". Using an automated tool does not absolve you of consequences, particularly one nigh-universally well-known to fabricate things.
Anything which could have a material impact on the sale price which is misrepresented in images is fraud, plain and simple.
Fake furniture is bad enough (the scale issue you mention is the main problem) but fake parts of the house should definitely be illegal.
Mark Zuckerberg should take note.
- Relocated the sink from the back counter to the kitchen island.
- Added outlets that didn’t exist.
- Displayed furniture layouts that were not possible in the actual space. That couch looks great in that spot, except when you explore further you realize it’s sitting right up against the master bedroom’s door.
To that last point, no stager would lay it out that way because anyone viewing the apartment would take them to task for you know… having to drag a couch out of the way to open their bedroom door. Staging layouts have always been more pretty than practical but AI staging regularly puts functionally DOA layouts on display.
As far as I’m concerned it’s disingenuous at best, and deception realistically. The process is broken while this slop is in there.
Most real estate agents are going to stage a house or condo for real regardless because people are really going to go there, not just look at pictures online or show up with a VR headset. So in practice this is only going to affect rental units that are not staged.
Pretty soon they'll take the stickers off mowers warning people to not put their hand under it while it's running.
The world isn't in a good place...
I'll preface this by saying that I don't agree with how things are working currently. But, the way the existing protections get enforced is by an individual or group of individuals filing lawsuits.
Our regulatory agencies have either been completely gutted by DOGE, or just no longer have an appetite to do any kind of proactive enforcement, so its now up to the victims who have been wronged to bring the violation to the attention of the courts/regulatory bodies responsible for enforcement.
Part of me feels like this is intentional and by design, because bringing suit is an expensive and time consuming process and naturally locks out the people harmed the most by these violations. Its the same method by which slumlords/bad landlords get away with so many blatant violations of the various landlord/tenant laws; their tenants can't afford the lawsuits and the lawyers to protect themselves.
The legal system needs to be made much more accessible, but I'm not sure how that happens or what that looks like.
lol
Have you tried finding a lawyer recently? For anything?
>The legal system needs to be made much more accessible, but I'm not sure how that happens or what that looks like.
As far as consumer protection goes, the party with greater resources or sophistication (e.g., if you retain counsel against a pro se defendant or plaintiff) should have a higher standard of proof; be forced to follow formal procedural rules, no matter the venue; and bear all costs if they're the ones who brought suit. If you use the court system as an arm of your business, you shouldn't get any leniency in terms of crossing your t's and dotting your i's. I don't know how you get there, but that's the fastest way to level the playing field.
> As far as consumer protection goes, the party with greater resources or sophistication (e.g., if you retain counsel against a pro se defendant or plaintiff) should have a higher standard of proof
No. Holding parties to different standards of evidence is a horrible idea and would do so much harm to a legal system that is already in many cases failing to function the way it was intended.
Determining who has "greater resources or sophistication" is itself a very thorny issue. For example, class action lawyers often look for Average Joes to become lead plaintiffs in highly-targeted lawsuits. These lawsuits are, in at least some if not many cases, designed less to defend the interests of individuals who have been harmed in some way (even theoretically) and more to extract settlements that result in hefty legal fees for themselves.
In these cases, it would be naive to treat the plaintiffs (who I would argue are proxies for the attorneys) as the parties with fewer resources or sophistication.
We already do that. Plaintiffs can introduce whatever, and as long as it's plausible, defendants have to directly prove it's a falsehood or otherwise inadmissible (not just that it's plausibly so, perhaps circumstantially). Sewer service is a glaring example.
>In these cases, it would be naive to treat the plaintiffs (who I would argue are proxies for the attorneys) as the parties with fewer resources or sophistication.
You're assuming that I disagree. Pro bono/contingent/discounted hours billed would count towards "greater resources or sophistication", and while I'm sure lawyers would love to argue whether or not that's fair, I think you'd find that the Average Joe would say so. And I'd really like to live in a system which has his needs in mind more than that of Dick C. Eshahl, Esq.
Well yeah. That's what they ran on, and people voted for it.
The overturning of the Chevron doctrine removed the ability of the government to do many kinds of proactive enforcement.
> Part of me feels like this is intentional and by design
It is absolutely intentional and by design. It aligns with other recent changes in the legal landscape, such as ending the ability for lower federal courts to issue nationwide injunctions. This requires more groups to accumulate more funds to pursue more lawsuits in more regions, re-establishing standing, re-establishing harms, re-arguing against the same harmful and illegal acts.
You're allowed to fight back, but only after you've been harmed, and only at great expense and effort, and with the deck stacked against you at every level.
you may not understand the other side because of biases but if you just say "oh 50% must be crazy / be stupid" then noone can have an honest debate. but I guess gone are those days.
self dealing = care to expand? probably some thing about trump's investments I assume. rich people make money, sure. but I'd rather someone be rich before office not have their son work on a Ukrainian oil company while their father is VP that handles relations with said country.
disrespect for the constitution = really generic, but does that include the 1st and 2nd amendment for you? Or should that be infringed because of misinformation and fear? Might want to say what you think is being infringed and how.
racism = I assume border enforcement / ICE? not racist to enforce immigration laws, every country does. what's fucked up is letting people get exploited by cartels then having this quasi legal status that you leave for others to cleanup.
You must be incensed over Jared Kushner's diplomatic roles and $2B investments from the Saudis, then?
Meanwhile Jared got the Abraham Accords and is working on other peace deals.
Hunter was a crackhead being paid in diamonds by a corrupt oil company. Not the same is it?
> Hunter was a crackhead being paid in diamonds by a corrupt oil company. Not the same is it?
For sure. Kushner/Trump's corruption is far more lucrative.
Hunter Biden is not in office, is not running for office. I wouldn't support a campaign from him because "whose crotches were involved in your creation" is not a qualifying factor for much of anything besides assigning a last name.
Trump is in office, and is actively, brazenly corrupt. And you're OK with it for...reasons?
My criticism is not of Hunter, but of Joe Biden. The last D president. The most popular D (by votes) in history.
It's worse for people to entirely to benefit purely based on if their dad is in charge. That's nepotism.
However Kushner is in office, he does work on peace deals in the middle east. He has an official title and does work with many countries and many people. It makes sense for him to make connections over there.
It's not unreal to believe he met people in SA and they all wanted to make a business deal on their own. That's individuals making their own decisions at noone's expense. No demands (like firing a prosecutor). Not quid pro quo.
It's unreal to believe Hunter had any knowledge about Ukrainian oil and being paid in diamonds was legit, plus his business partner outed him. And all while his dad was handling relations with that country, and while he bragged about getting the prosecutor fired that was investigating the company. That's quid pro quo. That's nepotism. That's corruption.
Actually, that's part of the problem. Jared Kushner did have a formal government job during Trump's first admin. He does not have one in the 2nd term. He's not even a "special government employee" like they made Musk.
He's a "volunteer" who is then given substantial foreign policy influence in a region where he is also a substantial financial player. And it all happens with him having no formal duty to the United States, no particular rules of the road for what's allowed and what's not, because he's (quite intentionally, IMO) existing in a gray area.
Some questions for you to ponder on -
What purpose does Trump Crypto serve?
Why was CZ pardoned?
nothing about policy or any specific thing you could have a civil conversation about.
they didn't even say what perceived racist, corrupt, etc. delusional take they're talking about.
unless I'm on a liberal newsletter how would I know the conspiracies they're talking about?
to answer in one word GP's main question "Which part attracts you the most?"
Sanity.
I still think that a large percentage of MAGA red hat voters (who don't necessarily represent all GOP voters) have bought into the populist rhetoric rather than actively understanding and supporting the actual policy but I'm sure there are plenty of people like you out there who are actively choosing this.
How does stopping agencies from making up their own interpretation of laws do anything to prevent proactive enforcement? (Do you just mean they're now more limited in their ability to make up new laws and proactively enforce those? I'm pretty sure prohibitions on false advertising are actual laws.)
Speaking more generally beyond the context of this specific situation, I agree representative democracy moves slower than other systems of government, but I personally don't think that's sufficient justification for ceding control of the legislative process to an unelected oligarchy. I think the overturning of cheveron was good push back against that trend.
This is one of the benefits Realtors(tm) and other licensing boards (lawyers etc) like to tout - we have a code of ethics, we self-regulate, you are safer with them than with Joe Agent, blah blah. You see how that goes.
Good.
Everything is "okay" with Trump. This social experiment got out of hand long ago. I mean come on, if we (as a society) allowed and okayed pedophilic tendencies, why do we keep looking for the lowest point on the bar? I'm pretty sure, Trump can consume human flesh on live TV and we'd just shrug it off and forget that even happened two weeks later.
Basically you buy/rent whatever was advertised, and if reality doesn't match, welp thats a defect the seller/landlord must fix at their own expense.
Room shows a vent but in reality there isn't one? Well, the seller has to install it or cover the costs of what an installation would cost.
If you do sue and it’s a rental, good luck renting ever again. You’ll never pass the background checks.
Doctoring a photo slightly to make an area look larger, or just using a wide-angle lens though it can cause visible distortion. Removing unsightly poles, signs, trees, neighbouring properties was also common.
Making the sky bluer and removing clouds is acceptable.
Staging and virtual staging (including sky replacement and removal of trash cans) are allowed so long as they don’t alter the true nature of the salable property.
I am surprised that AI hasn’t been policed more. Probably they just don’t have the ops for it.
When we went there to see the one we’d actually be renting, it was clear it hadn’t been cleaned in years, doors were off the hinges, counters had holes burned in them, stove was kicked in, etc.
Ran fast from that “deal”.
Likewise, if I want to see AI renders of what the apartment may one day maybe look like - I can ask for it. Or make the render myself with my tool of choice. But I'll need to know what it actually looks like to do that.
Sadly Google in particular don't obey rule #1 even for machine translation, so it's going to be an uphill battle to get companies to understand.
the actual bedroom could only fit queen size bed ;(
That's what the upvote/downvote feature is for.
https://www.amazon.com/iDOO-Mattress-Inflatable-Camping-infl...
If you make it a technical solution, e.g., browser plugin, it become an economic opportunity that can create money instead of cost money.
Cool, so money is made from lying to me, and more money is to be made from what is fundamentally still lying to me, but with somewhat different intent.
That seems like a lot of pointless economic friction that doesn't generate real value, but what do I know.
2 months ago while looking for apartments, the majority of the pics shown were generated by AI. The pictures generated by AI often looked much more brighter, cleaner and larger and when I visited them in person, they were the opposite. I wasted so much time visiting due to this.
I understand the intention but the pictures are so wrong most of the time and hide so much imperfection that it should be illegal for false advertisement.
It’s just used to be more expensive to hire someone to do it for you.
The altered images always e free stirs the same bright walls and grey magazine style furniture.
AI is just making it cheaper, but this was bound to happen.
(Images altered this way do have a small watermark stating so)
(Unrelated, my favorite one was getting to the apartment and learning the “bedroom” was a flex wall in the kitchen)
> e free stirs
Unless people prove me wrong, and they really fall for that...
Its like we used to be flooded with fisheye lens pictures of homes, that made the rooms way bigger then reality. I noticed that this trend (on the immo that i follow for years) has heavily reduced. Because nothing beats a sale, as people seeing something looking spacious on pictures and then in person seen its way more small/cramped/compact.
I love that new trend of 3D home viewing... It saves you so much time, and saves time for the immo people, filters out a lot of people with less interest.
But there are plenty of rental markets where you can be forced to rent without seeing that exact unit first. Common in big complexes, where you might get shown a "similar unit" or in markets where rental vacancy is so low that if you don't apply & sign within hours, you aren't getting that apartment because there's 20+ potential tenants for every rare vacancy. The current renal home I live in I rented without seeing it in person first because it was the only vacancy at the time, and in that market you must be first to sign the lease or you lose.
Users can rate how accurate the description was, the real life flaws and even upload their own photos.
Side note: last time I looked for a house I really wasted 95% of my time because every house had one unique major flaw that would have made me not even bother going to see it.
You could get really sophisticated with quality checking reviews.
(We tend to believe all review systems have to be bad because that’s all we see. But most reviews systems are broken because a working system is a conflict of interest for the platform they’re on.)