Not going to lie, I wish they also added a square footage as a legal requirement too.

It is entirely baffling to me as to why, but NYC is the only major city in the US I've ever lived in where it is genuinely a problem. In all other cities, I had no issues with that, pretty much every single posting online had square footage.

Meanwhile, on StreetEasy (and other platforms listing NYC rental units), looking for apartments is a major pain, because majority have zero square footage info. And then it turns into a pure guessing game that becomes super annoying, because an apartment I might be interested in is listed only as "1 bedroom", but just looking at the pics it is impossible to gauge whether it is 400sqft or 900sqft. Knowing that info would have made it much easier for renters, and I cannot think of a logical reason to not provide that information.

During the press conference he finished with a light joke that was something like “after all it’s meant to be Street Easy not Street Hard”. I assumed that was an app, your post unintentionally closed the loop for me!

Agree AI modified listing make no sense to allow; regulation here is making up for platform failure.

It's super annoying, but this is a total nothing burger because he doesn't actually have any power to do anything here.

This has also been a problem long before AI with "virtually staged" apartments.

That kind of regulation has failed over and over. The obvious outcome is that every listing will have misleading AI "photos".

Thanks, and you can go ahead and ban all the regular advertising too while you're at it.

Advertising would be fine if they checked it. Food advertising has used fake images forever, but it's okay because you know the meatballs don't look like that. You have an idea of what warm fries taste like without the fake heat imagery.

But the dress you get is not the same as the dress in the picture. If the model looked like you, the dress should fit the same, but the AI dresses don't. Same figure, same skin color, same height, and yet the dress looks different.

That's the problem with homes. There's no way a room fits that many things but AI will make it look like it does. There's a distortion where it changes the specification entirely.

It's like showing someone playing Fallout 4 on a MacBook Air. It's a deceptive practice, unlike the cereal boxes showing milk.

> - dating

That's called catfishing.

You trust AI with dating?

Does basic photoshop count as AI usage...? What about changing color balance, dynamic range, etc?

Because every time something new comes along, people will push boundaries while arguing it is acceptable. In this case, they may argue that it is no different from physically furnishing an apartment, taking some photos, then removing the furniture. At least in terms of representing the product. Clearly using AI is much easier and cheaper than physically furnishing the apartment for a couple of hours. Some may even genuinely believe this, seeing it as more a tool of convenience than something that doesn't always represent physical reality.

At some point I hope we as a society stop trusting anything we see online. It's fake, slop, generated bullshit in most cases and only getting worse.

Nothing like the bait and switch of a hardwood floor going from pristine in the AI photo to absolutely trash IRL

It's exactly because there are laws against deceptive advertising that Mamdani can enact theses rules.

NYC's Administrative Code prohibits deceptive trade practices, false advertising, misleading representations made to customers, etc. It gives the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection authority to execute those broad guidelines by enacting specific rules.

So Mamdani and the DCWP are basically saying, "City law gives us the authority to regulate this sort of thing, and because this is clearly in violation, here are the specific rules we're enacting to regulate it."

It does. This isn't new laws, it's an application of existing law on this practice.

Consumer protections aren't as fundamental and straightforward in the USA compared to most of the developed world.

i love this rule, but then again everything i agree with is 'common sense' to me!

Mamdani is pretty much the opposite of a broken clock. Somehow he manages to deliver every single time.

Students, out of state, and other groups may sign a lease sight unseen. Yeah its dumb but it does happen. Yes there is -some- reasonable assumption of risk, but not to the extent to allow blatant deceptive advertising.

A real estate photographer described the typical job as taking 15 photos of the same living room while moving a softbox around and then merging the layers in Photoshop. No Photoshop would be like no copy pasting permitted while writing code.

Why not just put the floor plan with no photos then, or just photos of an empty room with white walls? I can imagine myself how a room _could_ look, what added value does your imagined version add?

Cities in the US can pass laws. They're called local ordinances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_ordinance#United_States

It works because they are allowed to by the state, by a process specified by the state. The rules and ordinances of a county or municipality are subordinate to the laws of the state that granted them existence in the first place. There's a lot variety in "by a process specified by the state", which results in different structures: commissions, charters, mayoralties with councils, and more.

Cities have city councils that pass laws.

This likely doesn't even require a new law. There is probably an existing law against deceptive advertising in renting. This is just the mayor announcing that he will interpret the existing law to cover AI generated staging images.

well, reading the article Mamdani is cracking down on "deceptive landlord practices" thus it means his administration will apply deceptive landlord practice laws to use of AI images in advertising apartments. At some point if somebody wants to fight the issue they can take it to court.

As a general rule you probably don't need new laws to penalize behavior you think should be penalized, there are more than enough laws where a good faith interpretation would fit.

Given that this would be the first ever law with any degree of ambiguity ever created, we should create some type of like... room... maybe call it a "court"... where people could "judge" whether a person fell on the allowable or disallowable end of the spectrum

It's a groundbreaking idea but it might work. And who knows, maybe it's an innovation we could apply to other areas of law in case they also ever need to interact with any ambiguity (which hasn't happened yet, of course).

  > some type of like... room... maybe call it a "court"... where people could "judge" whether a person fell on the allowable or disallowable end 

no, the photos you take with the lenses on your phone are not AI generated. They are generated from the sensors on your phone.

Have you seen some of these listings? We are talking about retaining walls invented where they can’t exist, work displayed that hasn’t occurred, etc. if you show up to a property and it’s materially different than the picture that got you there, that should be illegal.

If you want to make an argument that “everything is AI now” go for it. But I’m happy to see existing false advertising laws evolve as technology evolves

If you take a photo of your apartment does your iPhone automatically make it twice the size, add modern renovations, paint the walls and add all new furnishings?

Yep. Most phones are doing computational photography mining images creating things that never where quite there.

Does your iPhone edit the image such that it’s substantially deceptive regarding the quality of the apartment to a reasonable person?

How often would you say you prompt your camera to líe about you in a bid to rent yourself

Yes clearly that is what is meant here.

I am not a lawyer, but this seems unlikely. Federal law prohibits "false advertisement" which is understood to include misleading advertisements. Regulators can and do restrict certain types of commercial speech, and this kind of restriction has survived First Amendment challenge.

False advertising does not have first amendment protection, surely. And requiring potentially misleading AI images to be labelled surely doesn’t infringe.

Coincidentally been researching SCOTUS first amendment decisions

A number of them through the 50-80s plainly state publics right to truth trumps broadcasters and corporate right to lie

Just a taste of how off their nut the current right wing court is

That's actually more aggressive than the rule as it exists, which merely requires that AI-modified listing photos be labeled as such.

> Studios at $5500. 1 beds at $7500.

Zillow quotes: "The average rent for all bedrooms and all property types in New York, NY is $3,710."

Where are your figures sourced from?

I just moved into a new apartment and tried using AI for layout inspiration. Every single attempt expanded the room, shrunk furniture, and even changed where walls were.

Landlords should not be using tools to stage units, it's going to lead to false expectations on the size of apartments.

In the 1960s Campbells Soup got in trouble with the FTC for using marbles to raise the ingredients and make the soup look fuller than it was. This was the real standard for deceptive advertising.

I dont care about simulating furniture placement specifically, but most use of AI in advertising that I see today would not be acceptable under that standard.

AI images being able to deceive you isn’t justification, if anything it’s the opposite. The staged furniture is there to help you visualise the size of the room. While AI furniture tricks you while not accurately representing the room size and layout.