Renters and home buyers are seeing AI-‘enhanced’ property photos. Now NSW is changing the rules

Real estate agents across New South Wales have been quietly deploying artificial intelligence to digitally enhance property listings, smoothing wrinkles out of walls, brightening dim rooms, and erasing clutter—creating a widening gap between what buyers see online and what they find at the open house. Now regulators are cracking down, recognizing that AI-generated images amount to deception when they misrepresent a property's actual condition, threatening to upend an industry practice that has become standard in the digital age. The rule change marks one of the first major regulatory challenges to AI's creeping integration into everyday commerce, raising urgent questions about which industries will face similar scrutiny next.

The Conversation·Oct 13