An apartment can appear online with a new floor, a refurbished kitchen and furniture arranged in order to make the rooms look bigger. Then, during the visit, the floor is still to be remade, the kitchen is different and some details shown in the photographs do not exist. Artificial intelligence has made this kind of intervention more economical, quick and difficult to recognize.
A bill presented in the State of New York wants to introduce a precise obligation: those who use digitally modified real estate images should declare it alongside each photograph. In the ads published online should also show the original version of the image, or enter a direct link that allows you to consult it.
The bill A11635 was filed on 29 July by the Democratic State MP Linda Rosenthal, president of the Housing Committee of the Assembly. It concerns both properties for sale and those for rent and would apply to real estate agents, sellers, owners and administrators.
The proposal does not prohibit the virtual installation and does not prevent the use of artificial intelligence to present a possible arrangement of spaces. However, it establishes that the potential customer should be able to distinguish what really belongs to the property from what was added to the computer.
According to the definition contained in the text, a photograph is “modified digitally” in which photo editing programs or artificial intelligence tools have been used to add, remove or change property elements. The examples include furniture, household appliances, floors and walls. The proposal also separates images and videos produced, in whole or in part, with artificial intelligence generation systems.
Not all interventions would trigger the obligation. They would exclude light and exposure adjustment, white balancing, color correction, crop, image straightening and other changes that do not change the property conditions. The criterion does not depend on the program used, but on the result: making a room brighter would be allowed without warnings, while adding a refrigerator, digitally replacing a floor or changing a wall would require a visible statement.
The latest AI tools allow you to produce credible images even when changing important features of the house: this makes it increasingly difficult to understand when a retouching with artificial intelligence has been done or not.
In July Curbed told the case of a rent stabilized apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, proposed just over $2,300 a month. The photographs showed a renewed kitchen and a carefully furnished room. During the visit, part of the apartment had turned out to be a basement without windows, with dirty walls and a very different lighting than that of the announcement. The problem, in similar cases, is not that the furniture shown in photography is not included in the rent, but that the digital processing conceals the real conditions of the environments.
The matter had already entered the agenda of the Municipality before the presentation of Rosenthal’s proposal. In July, the administration of Mayor Zohran Mamdani published the Rental Ripoff Report, a program of 23 interventions elaborated after five public hearings organized in the borough between February and April. More than 2,400 New Yorkers participated in the consultations, including online testimonies.
Among the interventions announced there is a rule of the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection that should obligate to clearly report the photos modified in the rental listings. Once the standard is defined, the department intends to collaborate with platforms such as StreetEasy and Zillow to enforce it. The municipal measure would cover the rent market in New York City; Rosenthal’s bill would instead be state-owned and would also include trades.
Neither of the two interventions is in force. On the state level, however, there are rules prohibiting real estate agents from publishing dishonest or misleading ads. In November 2025 the Department of State had warned consumers and professionals about the increase of images produced or retouched with artificial intelligence. The current rules require that advertising contains a fair and accurate representation of the property; violations may lead to disciplinary measures against agents and brokers. State laws against misleading advertising can also be applied to other parties involved.
The A11635 proposal would add a simpler criterion to check. It would no longer be necessary to establish only if a photograph has crossed the border, often questionable, between enhancement and deception: the presence of a substantial change should be declared and the original image should remain accessible.
The text still leaves some aspects to be defined. It does not introduce specific penalties for failure to publish the notice. Moreover, the obligation to show the original version is expressly formulated for the modified photographs, while a representation created entirely by artificial intelligence may not have a corresponding original.
At the moment the bill is in the Housing Committee of the Assembly and has not been voted. It was presented after the conclusion of the Ordinary Calendar of Sessions of 2026, which ended in June, and its path will therefore depend on the resumption of legislative work. If it were approved in the current formulation, it would enter into force sixty days after becoming a law.
Meanwhile, those who believe they have been deceived by an ad can report to the Division of Licensing Services of the Department of State. The new proposal would not replace this procedure: it would add to the existing rules a comparison that often lacks, that between the apartment shown by the algorithm and the apartment that is really behind the door.
L’articolo New York wants to make recognizable the modified real estate ads with artificial intelligence proviene da IlNewyorkese.
