Funda’s AI styling tool is inventing doors and staircases

Funda’s new Virtual Styler promises to help buyers see past a dated kitchen by re-rendering a room in six different moods, from Scandinavian to hotel chic. An alert reader has found that it also invents architecture that does not exist.

The examples are hard to miss. One rendering adds a steel door beside a fireplace that would open directly into the neighbouring property. Another gives a bedroom wall a doorway it never had.

A small box room is transformed into a grand hallway, and a staircase appears in a corner leading nowhere.

The reader who collected the screenshots argues the tool is not merely imperfect but inconsistent with Funda’s own rules.

The platform tells estate agents that AI images must stay realistic, yet sells them the styler for 649 euros as part of its Gold package while applying a looser standard to itself.

Funda does not dispute that the results can be wrong. Its spokesperson said the platform’s regulations require listing images to represent a property accurately, or where AI is involved, to give a realistic sense of what is possible, the aim being that buyers are not misled.

She acknowledged that generative AI can produce unexpected or incorrect details, which is why the site flags in several places that results may differ from reality.

Users can report a bad rendering with a thumbs down. Funda says that feedback is how the tool improves, and rejects the suggestion that it holds photographs and AI visualisations to different standards, arguing they are simply different things serving the same principle.

Source: De Telegraaf