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.

There are software tools made specifically for staging (and de-staging!) real estate photos. I don't know if they're using off-the-shelf image models or not, but they have capabilities like restricting changes to specific regions of the image which aren't available in services like ChatGPT.

(De-staging is a particularly neat trick - if a property still has some of the current tenant's belongings in it, an AI model can remove those items to show what the room would look like empty.)

The listings I saw with AI staging usually alternated photos, 1 photo unstaged, the next photo staged.

Which meant you could toggle between the staged and unstaged photo. I didn’t notice any warping or distortion.

Yeah. With CAD models, every single trick I have tried to make photo mock-ups with an AI image-to-image conversion, whether using a line art or canny edge detector or just a shaded source object, has seen the AI ultimately ignore the cues in some generations, no matter what I do, and I would expect it to work a lot better with room photography.