I’d like to take you through a property listing description I came across that is absolutely unhinged, and a perfect example of how damaging AI can be if it is unsupervised. Of course, AI has countless effective uses, but there’s an increasing tendency to assume that you can just “turn on some AI” and let it go about its work with little oversight. Writing listing descriptions with AI is a real time-saver, but beware of turning your back on the machine.
Now, on to the listing quotes I promised. To be fair, these were from a third-party site, and may not have been part of the original listing. However, the attempts to sound casual and human in this incredibly long, 750-word description appear increasingly desperate and make you question the legitimacy of the entire website. Here’s the first quote:
“There’s a single fireplace in the home. Perfect for those wintery nights. Finally, the property is currently sourcing its water from a water system.”
What? How could the property source water from something that isn’t a water system? Even catching rainwater in a bucket is technically a system, right? I’m already putting way more thought into this than the writer did. It continues:
“The home comes with a single bedroom. Residents will have access to 4 full bathrooms. There are 4 partial bathrooms in the home [which has] 3,211 sqft of living area.”
To be honest, I’m now fascinated to see this home that has a single bedroom and eight bathrooms, four full baths and four partial. Is this home 90% bathroom? I’ve actually come across this weird AI hallucination of bathrooms a number of times in other places. There’s more:
“Fans of architecture and design would be interested in knowing that the building on the property was built in an unknown style.”
Yes, I’m still interested, but not for the reasons I should be. So it’s a home made almost exclusively of bathrooms, built in a style that fans of design will immediately recognize as “unknown.” I love the almost condescending start to this sentence–only connoisseurs of architecture and design will be able to truly appreciate that no one has any idea what this is. Or perhaps it’s made in the style of Bathroom, which is confusing for the uneducated? It continues:
“The inside of the home is being cooled with central air conditioning at the moment.”
At the moment?? Who knew built-in central air could be so casual? It sounds like the central HVAC is sort of stopping by and plans on leaving soon. I am DYING to see this house.
The AI that wrote this really tips its hand with this sentence:
“Residents will have the luxury of enjoying a unknown.”
I can’t wait to confront the unknown in total luxury.
Needless to say, the house is absolutely not as fascinating as it sounds, which is disappointing. I looked it up on another website, and it’s a completely average Dutch colonial with 4 bedrooms, 4 full bathrooms, central air, municipal water, etc.
Obviously, AI is going to change our lives significantly. However, every industry seems to feel that they’re falling behind if they don’t find ways to incorporate AI into absolutely everything immediately, even when it isn’t yet practical to do so. Real estate is an especially person-focused business, so when your website and other advertising materials seem artificially intelligent, it may turn customers off more quickly than in other industries.
Even in industries that are less personal, when AI is incorporated into a company’s business in an unthoughtful manner, it can have disastrous results. One major online news outlet recently was outed for wildly inaccurate claims across many articles, which turned out to be due to over-reliance on AI. In some cases, AI even plagiarized excerpts from other articles (link is at the end of this article). Last year, a lawyer famously used ChatGPT to write his briefs, which quoted countless laws that didn’t exist, and resulted in sanctions against the lawyer and his firm.
It’s not just these extreme cases that can be damaging to your business. I’ve noticed myself becoming overly sensitive to articles that seem to be written by AI, even if they don’t contain obvious errors like the examples above. I’m sure there are countless articles that I read and don’t notice the AI influence, but websites that don’t disguise their AI use well I quickly click away from and don’t revisit. Even if an article has good information, if it seems like AI wrote it, I psychologically lose connection with the material presented, since it feels like the AI isn’t trying to communicate a thought; it’s just trying to sound plausible. To be fair, a lot of articles written by humans are also just trying to sound plausible, so it’s not that humans are always better. However, in real estate, creating the feeling of human connection is crucial, even if you’re using AI, and people are becoming far more sensitive to anything that feels like artificial intelligence. At some point, will it become trendy to have AI purposefully add common human punctuation errors to disguise its influence? Should I do that in this article to convince you Im reall?
If you take one thing away from my rambling, it’s that you should have a process in place in your business to constantly check what is written on your website and other advertising materials. This is true whether or not you use AI, but it’s especially true in the real estate industry. In real estate, agents are usually fiduciaries to their clients, and we’re not at a place yet where AI can owe someone fiduciary duties. In the scary situation of making the biggest purchase of one’s life, most people want a person as a guide, rather than to feel like they’re screaming into customer service bot. Even if your advertising relies heavily on AI, do it carefully and with the appearance of a personal touch. The last thing you want is to find out ChatGPT sold your client a one-bedroom house with 19 bathrooms while you weren’t looking.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/cnets-decision-to-write-stories-with-ai-backfires/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2023/06/08/lawyer-used-chatgpt-in-court-and-cited-fake-cases-a-judge-is-considering-sanctions/
https://www.reuters.com/legal/new-york-lawyers-sanctioned-using-fake-chatgpt-cases-legal-brief-2023-06-22/
AI Can Ruin Your Brand
