AZillow listing in Detroit recently went viral—and not for the usual reasons. Rather than boasting a zany interior or other routine indicators of gluttonous excess, the house itself was rather ordinary: a warmly painted craftsman featuring a handsome dormer and a cozy porch. Or so it seemed. As netizens scoped out the listing on Google Street View, it soon became apparent that images of the house had been extensively doctored with AI. Gone were the shed dormer, the clean, freshly painted exterior. (There is a dormer, but it’s gabled—i.e., a completely different shape.) Even the yard in the listing photo tapped into the uncanny: too green, flat, like an illustration. The actual house, as it exists in the physical realm, is—to put it politely—a fixer-upper at best, with chipped paint, outdated aluminum-paned windows, and general presentation of wear and tear. Perhaps more shocking than the exterior facelift were the listing’s images of the interiors, each glowing, as AI images do, with the haze of the filter. The house itself was not AI-generated—after all, that would be fraud—but what was real and unreal blended together in a slurry of ambiguity, of truth and lies.

Over the last couple of years, a number of AI services such as virtualstagingai.app and the video generator AutoReel have infiltrated real estate for the same reason they have infiltrated every other creative industry: to undercut or eliminate the work of skilled laborers. Rather than liquidating photographers and stagers in one fell swoop, as Uber did for taxi drivers, however, the introduction of AI is merely accelerating a long-term labor trend in the real estate industry, where real estate agents have long been incentivized to cut out outside contractors in the pursuit of expanding their profit margins.

While the use of AI may feel especially egregious in its laziness, real estate listings have been gradually moving toward heightened artificiality for decades, beginning with the spread of Photoshop from the desktops of professional photographers to the everyman in the aughts. This shift was responsible for the proliferation of pictures that abused high dynamic range exposure, where every edge was a little too crisp and every sky a little too blue. By the dawn of the aggregator era (Zillow, Redfin, etc.), flagrant image manipulation had become the norm. Given the economic conditions, this was all but inevitable.

We take entirely for granted the ability to log onto the Internet and, since the founding of Zillow in 2006, instantly know the prospective value of any house. This development is arguably responsible for a number of social ills, from predatory flippers approaching vulnerable homeowners to simple loss of privacy. (One could say that the first skilled real estate laborer to be undercut by the tech industry was the house appraiser.) Prior to the aggregator era, real estate listings fell under the purview of agencies and were available only through the Multiple Listing Service, a proprietary index agents once held under lock and key. After agents agreed to share their data with the aggregators to make their listings more competitive, the real estate website as we know it today—the endless feed of houses—was born.

According to Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff in his book Zillow Talk (yes, really), this was intended to “democratize” the real estate industry by liberating it from a handful of pesky gatekeepers. In reality, it has turned what was already a highly competitive field into a more exploitative one in which every measure must be taken to outcompete others on a now-transparent open market. This rat race, ironically for agents, devalues many of their previously valued skills, as well as those of the contractors they hired. Soft skills like writing and tour-giving were among the first to go.

For example, when two houses, each sold by a different agent, are equal in both price and amenities, the sale comes down to how each is presented within this information-dense landscape. This pressure leads agents toward the spectacular—or the specious—in order to get an edge on their competitors. These days, they deploy everything from drone footage, 3-D renderings and walkthroughs, digital staging, and (of course) image enhancement of varying degrees of quality. (I often find myself doubting that the sunset conveniently positioned behind a particular estate in Naperville, Illinois, really rivals that of Bali.)

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These developments, and with them the expectation that houses should look so flawless as to test the boundaries of the real, have already primed the landscape for the use of AI tools. Now AI is poised to wipe out one of the last skilled workers in the industry: the real estate photographer. A good real estate photographer can charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars per shoot, depending on the size of the property, often not including the cost of editing. Photographers have so far been able to adapt to newer trends, using wider lenses and apertures to let in the bright and diffuse light needed for digitally generated furniture to work best. But if it became possible for the agent, homeowner, or landlord to take photos on their phones and have AI enhance them in an even remotely plausible way—given the already lowered standards of the digital real estate economy—this would be an extinction-level event for one of the last avenues for making one’s living as a photographer. It would have ripple effects throughout the rest of the industry as well, including increased work for agents, the end of staging as a viable industry outside of luxury markets, and potentially legal consequences as the boundaries between enhanced and false advertising dissolve.

Right now, the technology isn’t quite there. After all, we can still recognize the difference between an AI image and a “real” one. The telltale yellow tinge of AI-generated imagery, the free generators that produce images with eerie luminosity, the constant errors introduced by the algorithms (such as the swapped dormers in our Detroit example)—all of these problems may hold AI back for now. But will they keep it at bay forever?

What will happen when we can no longer trust any imagery we see on the Internet? This is already a pressing question with regard to AI in general, but it hasn’t been considered in depth for real estate in particular. I think it’s entirely reasonable, given the long tradition of duplicitousness in the industry, that grossly misleading AI listings will become the new norm.

Paradoxically, this might not be an entirely bad thing in the long run—for agents or for buyers. Should AI imagery completely poison the image feed, it will make the real estate aggregator a less and less useful tool for buying, selling, and searching for houses. Should that be the case, it’s entirely possible that agents’ old system of exclusivity and in-person business could come back into vogue because only offline interactions will be, ontologically speaking, real. Given the fact that these aggregators have completely distorted our relationships to housing, shelter, and architecture in general, a world in which they are less influential or even useful might have interesting social and economic ramifications.

Culturally speaking, we’re already seeing brands such as the underwear company Aerie campaigning on their rejection of AI as a way of setting themselves apart from the noise—that is, they’re using humanity as a marketing ploy. (I find this quite sad on an existential level, but it’s better than the alternative.) Much like a body, a house is more than an image. It is physically, empirically, and incontrovertibly real. Maybe we’ll start remembering that the purpose of a house is not as an asset to be sold or a listing with varying degrees of verisimilitude, but as a place for dwelling, to be inhabited in the most vulnerable and human sense. That has always mattered more than a number on a website. It will always matter more than the pictures, too.