Please continue to be conscientious in which directions that you do and don't go with this, especially for rentals.

(When renters might be deciding entirely from photos, or be over a barrel when they arrive in town the last week of August, and are told to show up for a 5-minute tour with their checkbook in hand).

I'm starting to see people using photo enhancement for old apartments here in Boston, to obscure the condition of the apartment.

Originally, it was just the superwide shots that made the space look much bigger than it is. (Incidentally, be careful when removing distortion cues that this is going on, or you might make it even more deceptive.)

Then it started doing generated "staged" furniture and decorations, which are still fairly innocuous, although they can potentially cover up problems with condition and quirky architecture.

But now, with all-out "AI-filtered" "photos" (or sometimes 3D renders, like for new-construction apartment floorplans), you can't necessarily tell that a $3K 1BR is 150 years old, and minimally maintained, with grime that can't be cleaned, and suspended ceiling panels hiding the collapsed original ceiling, and the only renovation in the last few decades was a can of paint sloshed onto unfinished sheet of plywood wall from a budget apartment conversion.

My goals are really to make it easy for managers of these properties to edit their existing photos to look more professional without spending lots of time and money. Target is for them to just get the photos looking "good enough" bc I know AI won't be perfect as well.

Given, some people will use this to deceive their customers by blowing things out of current proportions but we can't help much in that case. Should I find any way to help though, I shall!

Interesting idea, however I think more focus needs to be put on ensuring that the photos still represent reality (as much an AI edited photo can). E.g. in the first example under Stage Empty Rooms, the type of window changes between the original and edited photo. I think focusing on more subtle edits to improve the consistency and appearance of photos, maybe with the odd object removal, would be a safer bet.

Gotcha. That's what wakes me up every day! It's a work in progress so this should be getting better by the day. Structural integrity must be maintained! I'm on it.

I'm curious if they'll get much traction at this price point. While there is a lot of money in a real estate transaction, agents seem to be (in general) pretty thrifty with spending. For example, their Starter plan is around what an agent's MLS fees will be. My company often buys third party tooling for all our agents use, but this price-point isn't even in the ballpark where we'd even consider it.

My impression is that the people that would be willing to pay for this, are the top producers who are likely to have a professional photographer doing it anyway. And the people who need it the most are the ones who seem to be the most thrifty -- the long-tail that aren't top producers. Maybe there's a middle ground in that grey area there that they're targeting?

(For reference: I'm head sys admin for an MLS; in the arena but not directly working with agents)

4ditor founder here :). Our prices are actually on the lower end compared to what others in this space are charging. The market we are targeting is that which spends a ton on photography and editing, or that which knows they have to spend that much but do not have the budget, so yes you're right, that falls in the category of realtors, property managers and photographers.

A good number of photographers are already paying a big deal of money for different services to help them get professional photos, and a good number outsource editing - and it's quite pricey. So we're targeting this demographic so we can do some of that work for them. Granted, we will not do everything they have been getting professional editors do, but we should get them somewhere that is good enough for most people. Same thing for realtors.

I'm bullish on AI, but this strikes me as fraud as a service....

Why say that?

Your customers are using these photos which have been manipulated to look better than reality to sell a physical good. While this happens all the time with standard things for sale, you'll often see disclaimers that the item isn't exactly the same as pictured, 'sequences shortened'.

With this, you're giving over the control of that choice to improve a photo to a system that is difficult to align. Let's give a scenario. The AI improves the photo by inserting power outlets where they are not. Or removes some sign of rotting wood on an exterior feature that later causes injury. Both the sellers and owners could reasonably have a cause of action against you for fraudulent manipulation of the truth.

If it was something much smaller than a house, I'd be less worried about it. But you're targeting the largest purchase someone is likely to make in their lifetime generally.

Obviously, there's lots of things that happen when buying a house that that mitigate this sort of problem, but as mentioned you're offering a service which affects the initial point where a potential buyer would interact with an ad in a way that's difficult to constrain to being truthful. Sure human editors can do this sort of thing too, but here it's being offered as a service. I'm guessing that "The AI did it" isn't an excuse you'd want to have to try to argue in a courtroom.

I agree with you, some bad actors will unfortunately use this to manipulate their audiences, and I'm def not in support of that. But unfortunately only so much can be done to prevent people from doing that.

That said, my goal is to simply make the process of repetitive editing much simpler, easier and cheaper - sort of like the things they already do. But AI is super powerful and it can do much more than that and we may not be able to prevent that from happening. This should not make us leave the good things from the table though.

Perhaps I'll rephrase a bit. There's no doubt in my mind that this sort of product will be used to mislead people to some extent regardless of your good intentions. To be clear, I'm not accusing you of intentional fraud here, but more that an unintentional fraud seems difficult to avoid when there are insufficient safe guards on this sort of product.

Your customers might not notice such a problem, in the same way that lawyers submitting AI generated court pleadings recently and being sanctioned by the courts did not notice that they were full of hallucinations. But the house buyers and renters will. And that may be a problem for your customers.

This is one of those things that makes a ton of sense, will be a successful product (whether here or, most likely, integrated into Zillow, Expedia, etc. for real estate, hotels, vacation rentals), but completely bums me out because the whole point of photos is to see what it looks like in reality.

Not one of the photos stays true to reality. I know AI will get better and more accurate and make less mistakes, but the end state is the platforms, or sellers, saying "Eh, let's just cover up that little hole or up the quality of the flooring or remove that branch that obscures the view."

The virtual staging is tricky, my company has been keeping an eye on the various options for it for a while and they tend to make what we consider "surprising" changes. Buyers are used to staging where there is furniture and art brought in, but the structure of the property they expect to be what they see in the photo. The example on this page has changed the window and flooring, and made what look like some painting and drywalling changes from what you'd get if you purchased the property. Another thing that often happens is that outside scenery changes, what you see through the windows.

Virtual staging is sometimes a hit and miss for us, especially for small, constricted spaces - the AI would just blatantly changes the structural integrity of the room and show something else.

Outside scenery is even worse with different seasons, it's ridiculous some times. But we've found for the most part, it tends to get it right. The other good thing is it's not a one shot thing, you get to keep revising it until it looks exactly as you'd want it. You can even target specific areas of the image you'd like to see and edit that part.

I get your point, totally. My Goal with this is to ease the burden of editing. Now, people already editing their photos at the moment, and they spend a ton of time and money doing that. My goal with this is to make the process a tad easier, cheaper and faster for most.

Now unfortunately some people will take this too far and cover up every hole and crack, completely obfuscating reality. That will be the unfortunate outcome from some