I've been raising money for Haya and her family who are trying evacuate Gaza. Haya and I have been in communication. She has lost so much and now is trying to get her sick mother to safety and medical care. If you have the ability join me in giving to her gofundme: www.gofundme.com/f/URGENT-HELP-me-to-help-my-family-to-evacuate-gaza
I think the allure is in the flowers.. and now that you mention AI, I've noticed lately photos of yards and gardens where there are flowers blooming that do not bloom at the same time during the season. Now I realize the plants are probably AI...
it's 100% the flowers, my municipality has stopped neurotically mowing every single surface and now that the wild flowers are coming in it's kind of making me emotional because it makes me realize what we've been missing out on. Especially having all those flowers right next to the road/path is just viscerally enjoyable.
I’m reminded of how some Renaissance artists would include hundreds of identifiable and botanically accurate species of plants in their paintings and tapestries and even make sure that they only depicted flowers that would have been in season together. Strange to think that even rather crude images that deliberately ignore all the trappings of ‘realism’ like perspective or naturalistic lighting nevertheless show that the artist understood the subject matter better than an AI capable of generating images that could easily be taken for photographs.
@@swedneckthe abundance of wild flowers is honestly such a big reason why I miss living in my rural town near sundsvall, we had wild flowers and wild strawberries growing. There's something about letting nature do its thing thats so satisfying to the eye
I wish they’d have to label AI photos. That way you can think of it as a suggestion for what you could do to your own house rather than a place you could go.
@@morgancookson3169 Haha I was thinking about the water tower video! That was one where I was like "Now certainly there's no way THIS is interesting, right?" and then Kendra proved me wrong.
I just wish visual charm and aesthetic details weren’t considered such a waste of resources/elite luxury item. I had accepted that I would spend most of my adult life in soulless rental properties, but somehow finding out how many other people there are on the internet who long for their environment to be pretty and memorable, as if that’s such a huge ask, has made it hurt so much worse. Maybe it’s one thing to think you’ll never get your dream bc you’re the only one who wants it, but it’s even sadder to know a lot of people want the same or similar dreams and they’ll still never get it.
I think it's psychologically very bad for people, to live in an ugly, soulless environment. It wears you down the same way, as the equivalent job environments. And unfortunately, both often go hand in hand. Can we blame people, for spending their free time on social media or with computer games, if that is the 'real world', they live in? Of seeking joy and comfort in fatty, sugary foods? Maybe even worse substances. We have a craving for things that delight and inspire us. That make our brain 'light up'. We need beauty and joy it is not optional.
Which just shows how disappointing/disheartening our present 'basic needs being met' environment actually is__more and more strangers having to commune together in order to keep a roof over their heads. 💩😢
You can get those details depending on where you are. Here in the Midwest, those details are on old houses, and if you are willing to put in some elbow grease, they are cheaper than newer soulless boxes.
Oh my god. I know nobody really cares, but last night my mom showed me this exact Facebook page and we had a discussion on AI realism. Then I woke up and one of my favourite RU-vidrs has made a video on it… life’s crazy.
You're starting to become a psychic, you might even be a pneumatic! World is getting a little less... full of lies! You can even do that precognition thing on demand, if you work at it. That's how bad things have gotten. The demons are using AI to try to communicate with us.
One thing about the AI house that I think subconsciously delights people is the front door: it's in the middle of the porch. Most houses have to have their door slightly to one side of the other because the front of the house is two rooms -- the living room and the dining room. But in really fancy old houses, you might have a long hallway running from the back to the front of the house (good for cross-breezes!) connecting rooms, so a front door in the middle makes sense. But in a little house like that, you might not have room for a hallway, even if the front would be too big for one big living room. So a symetrical little house with a perfectly centered door looks like something from a dream.
@@mitchjohnson4714 Humans are wired to prefer symmetry. It's bizarre to me when people insist they don't like it. Methinks it's a way to be contrarian, perhaps. People have this incessant desire to be different. "Not like other" humans. To each their own, by all means, but...
@@katie7748Symmetry's generally pretty dull. Looking straight at a cube it's a square, turn it 45 degrees to reveal a new dimension. Same with a face or a house. Also it's Imperfections and irregularities that are surprising, unique and interesting. Not that a Symmetry can't be a good thing some times.
@@katie7748 The bull's excrement! Asymmetry causes tension, and tension tends to be more fun and/or interesting than: Look, it's the same on both sides! Symmetry is, as @tirvine9102 states, generally pretty dull. Symmetry represents conformity, uniformity, etc. Hell, even uniforms often throw in some asymmetry for that juicy tension. Symmetry is often really fucking boring. Also, look up Contrapposto. Need I mention the charm of slightly dillapitated cottagecore houses? It's messy! Messy ain't symmetry! The Millenium falcon is/looks cool because of that offset cockpit, for example. For my money it's the coolest ship in the Star Wars universe almost solely because of that and BECAUSE most ofher Star Wars ships follow symmetric designs. It's not different for the sake of being different. It's different because different things exist. And difference should be celebrated. Playing it off as contrarianism implies that you're uninformed about design in general. And god forbid a desire to be different. I've watched enough people march to the same beat to not see wanting to be different as a bad thing. And, I may add to that, people ARE individuals. Every human being IS different. Wishing to conform is the toxicity of culture contributing to the erasure of your individuality. And even if you feel it is ugly, then you've had an emotion. I feel no emotion with most symmety than boredom. Ugly is better than boring. Normalcy is fascism. Because the art we consume and how we consume it does say something about who we are and how we view the world. And art and culture will influence how we see the world. And it is important to unpack that instead of saying "It's bizarre to see when people don't like symmetry, it's a way to be contrarian". Poppycock and hogwash. (Edited for narrative levity)
This video is what youtube is FOR. Informative on a topic I'm nominally interested in but know nothing about delivered in a soothing tone by an eloquent host. Just chef's kiss.
"an octagon house that'll make your rectangular house embarrassed for it's lack of obtuse angles" I just need you to know how much this made me laugh and you should be very proud for writing that line
The reason you'll get duplicates on the same day like that is because subscription-based generative-AIs will give you multiple image outputs for every search input. You only have a certain amount of AI-generation you can do depending on your payment plan. So not only are they fake, they're cheap too.
Why would they even pay for subscription when you can have local models like stable diffusion running on your own pc? You can literally pump out thousands of images a day with no cost beyond electricity.
@@bloxyman22 Local models may not be very practical unless you already have some decent hardware to run them on. They get quite VRAM heavy. Also, there are many classes of images that the open models just can't do as well as the big commercial ones. But yeah. When I mess around with Stable Diffusion I will often crank out batches of 100 images to a single promising prompt, and just let my computer grind it out while I do something else. Then I come back to manually pick out the handful of best results. Including all the test images to fine tune prompts and other generation parameters, I'll often generate >1000 images per day, saving a tiny fraction of them in my bloated collection. It hardly costs anything other than my time.
For me it would have been really helpful if the architectural features like "spindle work" and "brackets" were specifically pointed out (like "big red circle"-obvious, or perhaps tastefully spotlighted), since that's not common vocab for non-native speakers. (Though I totally understand that the content isn't tailored to me, no worries.)
If any of you are interested in learning more about historic architectural vocabulary, I would suggest "A Field Guide to American Houses" by McAllister. There centuries worth of common styles used and they have a picture dictionary. I'm an early career Arch. Historian and use the book every few months.
Fun story! My wife and I toured a home recently where, online, the front yard had a clear view to the house, and the backyard had a clear open space on the porch. Both views were super pleasant! But entirely fake?? They had used image editing (likely AI given the sheer amount of editing involved) to remove GIGANTIC banana trees from both spots. No photos on the listing included any of these absolutely huge plants, but they were the first thing you noticed on driving up. It was such a weird choice... Also, I'm relatively new to your channel, and I'm absolutely loving it! Thanks for the work you put into these videos!
Well...as long as the change is something, that could be realized fairly easily by the new owners, I'd say it's ok-ish. They should have included a picture of the property 'as is', but I can understand wanting to sell the vision of what 'could be'. As long as that 'could be' doesn't need building permits or large investments. How fun though, growing your own bananas 😅. Greetings from a perpetually cold and rainy part of the world!
@@raraavis7782 Haha very fair! It was just a visually absurd difference. Sadly, I don't think the trees would have ever produced fruit! The area is warm enough for the plants to grow, but not actually produce banana's haha.
Thank you. I am an artist myself.. and this image Gen AI will never really sit right with me. There’s no other medium in art who’s invention solely depends on eating up the creations of millions of other humans.. not to mention they did it without the consent of artists. I am sick and tired of people who push these images down our feed conveniently omitting the fact that it’s an AI generated image, fooling all of their audience into thinking it’s real. I am sick of these interior designers using it for “inspiration”.. when nothing like it will ever make sense.. because they cannot bend and break the rules of physics to create anything even close to in real life. And I am so sick of plenty of them pretending that they are the “artists” creating them and that AI is just a tool. It isn’t. Because a tool gives you control over your work. AI just gives you something pretty and relatively “complete” that then some of these people touch up at best.. but they think that’s the same as having control over an image and creating it from scratch. Prompt “engineering” (ugh they try so hard to make what they do sound complex) can be learned in under a day.. if not under an hour. I am sick of the lack of transparency around AI. They don’t disclose their work is AI, and when they do.. they don’t disclose how easy it is.. or how far from the real thing it will be.. or how much stolen work is being regurgitated without any credit to the real artists.
I'd rather spend an hour learning how to legitimately create the image I want to see (or searching for one that already exists) than learning how to 'prompt engineer'. That's what's discouraged me from using or trusting any of these new AI things: the lack of control I have over the process and output!
Yeah, I don’t even LOOK at other people’s artwork anymore because 99% of the time anything eye catching is just AI generated slop. It’s like we are are back to the bad old days of the only way to actually enjoy art is by visiting a gallery in person.
@@leejerrett8268 Exactly! And the few genuine artists will get flooded by 99% trash art, until they give up. It is sad to see this, and nobody even cares.
Thank you! These photos drive me crazy on FB. How can so many people not notice the two door knobs? The weird windows or all the spindles that don't match? The tree branches that aren't connected to any tree? It's so unnerving. And the people are all saying how they want to live there. 😆
I think the "people" commenting positively are actually bots. There is probably some kind of financial benefit to creating a page with a lot of traffic.
You raised a good point: conceptually, this kind of generative AI isn't doing anything that hasn't already been done for architectural renderings or just digital art in general. However, the fact that it can produce these results in seconds, for free or almost free, is troublesome for two reasons: 1. The speed allows people to generate or modify images on a whim, with no consideration for the quality of the output or the ethics or whether they should do it at all. Is it ethical to modify this image of my Airbnb listing to make the landscaping look a little nicer or fix the crooked siding? Where once upon a time you'd have time to contemplate this while finding and hiring an artist to do the work, and consider whether the artist might judge you for creating something that might be seen as deceptive, now gen AI is so fast and easy that you don't even have time to reflect: just click and go! It's the old Ian Malcolm "could vs should" thing at every turn. 2. The free-ness is only possible because gen AI stands on the backs of thousands of human creatives whose works have been stolen, uncompensated, as training datasets. In effect, when you use gen AI to create an image, you're actually asking a thousand faceless artists to create that image for you, then refusing to pay them, then claiming that technology has created something new and unique. If there were a mechanism in place to fairly compensate artists for their works used to train AI engines, we wouldn't have a problem. If AI had been prohibited from using copyrighted works, gen AI wouldn't exist in the first place and we also wouldn't have a problem. As it stands this is not a bell that can be un-rung. The technology is there and is getting better every day. The stolen training data is there and can't be returned. There's no way of restricting AI usage that is compatible with the First Amendment. Until we create a technological anti-AI solution that can auto-detect and flag AI products, we're defenseless. This is me being unhopeful.
There’s the additional fact that each prompt is not actually free- they each have a cost in energy and the need for water cooling systems. There was an article outlining these costs and basically said that each generation is equivalent to pouring a bottle of water on the ground. What a waste.
@@corvidsam I'm far from a socialist, and I used to generally believe in the principles of capitalism and free market entrepreneurship. But what I've seen in the past few years has helped me understand late-stage capitalism, and soured my outlook considerably. In the 20th century we witnessed the transfer of wealth from individuals to the owners of industrial means of production: factory owners, machine producers, etc. Now in the 21st century, we're seeing the same thing happen, but the winners are the ones who own the digital means of production: tech companies. It's the exact same thing all over again, except they're doing in a few decades what used to take over a century. I don't like to be a downer, but I fear this is only going to get worse and not better. Someone elsewhere said that the tech giants want us to think they're bringing us to the bright egalitarian future of Star Trek, when in reality they're creating the bleak and hopeless future of Blade Runner. I think they're right.
Paying artists now simply won't "solve" the problem. Transparency to the extent of who's art was sourced doesn't even exist for the developers. It should be made clear if it's AI generated at all. For any real standards to be upheld legislation needs to be put in place. It can't be left up to the massive companies who are rolling it out as fast as they can in a half baked state.
wish i could throw this comment at the people in the comment of a meme yesterday claiming human-made art has no place if AI can create it just the same. smh!!!!
For me, the white AI house has "Miss Honey's cottage from Matilda but prettier" vibes - nostalgically familiar and evoking big feelings. Love the video.
It’s the wisdom of crowds at work! You take thousands of individuals answering a question like how much does an ox weigh and an average will get you something close to the correct answer. I’ve never thought applying it to a subjective question like “what does a beautiful house look like?” would give you a coherent answer.
One more thing on the topic of Victorian houses. There are a lot of " explorer" channels that go into old "abandoned" houses. But those are usually on farmland and zoned so that if you buy the house, you have to also buy all that land. So they're often left to the elements. If we who love these houses get zoning laws changed to allow it, I'm sure many farm owners would gladly sell the houses instead of letting them fall apart. I'd like to see laws allowing that passed by all counties and states right now, when houses are so badly needed. It's usually a county thing.
Or, maybe, families would still occupy those houses if they could sell off some of the land they weren't using. However, zoning boards often rezone farm land to residential, rather than mixed, making it impossible for farmers to both sell the back forty and keep working a smaller farm.
@@robertawalsh2995 If you petition to sell off part of a farm you own, you could specify the number of acres you want to keep. I'm not against farms! I just think it would be great to save some of those houses instead of seeing them fall apart because no one lives in them.
@@ellen4956It doesn't work like that where I live. If the farm is rezoned, it's all rezoned as residential, so the farmer is either forced to sell or forced to pay property tax at residential value. An acre of farmland here might be $18,000, but residential property is valued at around $50,000 for 1/40 of an acre - $2 million/acre. You see the problem. I know of at least two farmers who used to live on the edge of town who were forced to sell because their farms were rezoned as residential.
There's something so comforting about your videos. Amongst all the noise on this website, your channel really does feel like a cozy little nook to hide out in. Thank you Kendra, i'm glad to have found you!
I'm so glad somebody is talking about these! I thought I could easily recognize an AI image until I started seeing these sorts of images all over Pinterest, and they totally got me the first few times. I still can't always tell immediately (or ever) and it's kind of scary. Also I love your dry humor.
when jordan sparks said "tell me how i'm supposed to breathe with no air" the air she was talking about was your channel and this video specifically. needed this thankz
Okay I just had to tell you I really really like your sense of humor. When you said that Alexander Jackson Davis didn't need an introduction because you already introduced him to us I had to pause it to laugh for about 5 minutes.
Thank you!!!! I was scrolling through Pinterest and noticed that it seemed like 50% or more of pins are AI generated. So these images were aspiring to DONT EVEN EXIST.
I'd love to live in that cottage in the thumbnail. It's a dream of mine to get my ankles absolutely covered in ticks every time I enter or leave my house 🥰
Thank you for pinpointing what I hate about AI images. I did see a good use for AI. Someone was wanting to remodel their kitchen and they knew the look they wanted but couldn’t picture the elements together to bring it to fruition. She put her concept into an AI generator and was given an image that helped her start creating her dream kitchen.
Oh, I've been doing that to sort out color palettes and clashing tastes! It's cheaper than making a lot of purchases and finding they don't work together. I even talked it over first with ChatGPT posing as an interior designer
Think of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House from 1948. The real estate agent convinces Cary Grant and Myrna Loy to buy a house that is literally falling down in front of them by saying things like, “you certainly have to visualize,” and they’re each remaking the house in their imaginations. I feel like that was every client I ever worked with.
I showed my mom this video when she was renovating and all her inspiration pics were AI. She got so mad that she'd been competing with homes she didn't know were fake, and now she won't stop showing me AI homes she found on social media. Ty Kendra for radicalising my mom.
I clicked on this video because I saw those cute AI houses all.over Pinterest! The first one I didn't realize was AI...but then the more of them I saw, the more suspicious I got, because the houses in the photos were all framed in exactly the same way in the image, in a way that set off an uncanny valley alarm in my brain. Then I saw this video thumbnail and I was like, AHA! Thanks for doing the work, Kendra ✨🏠
2:00 I actually guessed this correctly and pretty confidently, based on something you can tell at a glance: the image on the left has no camera focus, so things in the far background are just as sharp as things in the middle, while in the image on the right even things as close to the center as the bush are blurred from being out of focus. Real life photos always have a focal point where things outside that distance blur, but that's something you really go out of your way to do in rendering (video games call it "depth of field". You know, that thing everyone always turns off and yet every game has? Yeah that) and I'd imagine it's a huge pain in the ass to try to apply after the fact to an image compared to it just being a natural consequence of how cameras (and eyeballs) work. (also the image on the left looks like it's half pulling from photos and half from paintings, which does not help it)
I've recently decided that I want to build a house close to my parents in my hometown. I've been looking for smaller, cute houses with an older aesthetic on google and pinterest, I've found a lot of houses that are almost EXACTLY like I want it....but 99% of them are AI. It is honestly so infuriating. Imagine sending an AI house reference to an architect or something, showing what you're looking in a house, just to have them wonder why there are three chimneys, six different roofs and a hexagonal window in a random corner.
What about searching real estate sites for actual houses for sale? There tons of charming old houses that actually exist that would be helpful in your search for the right elements.
I love your sense of humour. I have no particular interest in architecture (no dislike either, note), but your videos are always so interesting, and the little jokes that you hide in the script are such a bit part of that. "he needs no introduction because I already told you his name" is absolute gold. Got a good giggle out of me. Thank you for that! I look forward to the next one.
I remember my first AI house heartbreak. It was a cozy boho bedroom with a lofted bed, filled with fairy lights, a suspended fireplace, and floor to ceiling windows revealing the viewer to be perched amidst a misty jungle canopy... RIP what never was😔
I am so grateful for your videos. I have you ever thought to do a video on the profound changes in architecture between the pre and post-war periods? Is it utilitarianism? Is automoblies? Is it cultural homegeneity? Why are houses so bland now?
That side by side of the AI and Inspiration houses reminds me of the comparisons between the Disney cartoon character and what they would look like in real life.
I liked one of these little AI cottages recently on Pinterest, and it was only after scrolling through the related images that I realized with dismay that they were all AI. I’ve also started noticing a lot of AI-generated “vintage” images in the Pinterest craft-o-sphere, and it’s really weird to encounter. It feels like a Where’s Waldo? puzzle that I didn’t know I was doing. And while I guess there’s no real harm in using images that are probably all public domain to make something new, it still gives me a weird feeling personally. Maybe because I don’t always catch it right away. Or maybe because once I do, I can’t unsee it and whatever was appealing about it is just gone.
This is a big ongoing controversy- the vast majority of machine learning data isn't open-source at all. (You can even see watermark artifacts in many AI images!) It's the biggest mass copyright infringement in legal history. But the law moves so slowly compared to tech. So at this point, it's hard to take AI companies to court. The answer to "from whom is this stealing" would be "practically everyone who uploads an image". Meta even sells users' uploaded images for AI data collection, with no option to withdraw consent. Including stuff like your personal photos, and artists' portfolios. 😐
I don’t have any particular interest in historical housing, but I could listen to you talk about your trip to the grocery store and be completely there for it. Thank you!
Just found out your channel and I'm amazed by it. You kinda remind me of Gina from the Brooklyn 99 series but without the narcissism. Just the good jokes and that chill voice tone. Also your content is giving me inspiration for my history degree research, thank you!
The 1846 house was given away as real because of the shadows and overexposed highlights in the grass. AI doesn't seem to do that. All the AI houses are perfectly exposed.
Kendra’s approach reminds me of Jonathan Meades, when he talks about the Victorian House. He’s worth looking out for, as he’s smart and hilarious, despite his deadpan delivery
I know it's so bad! I tried to fix the sound this video and immediately made the video so much worse. Next time I'm going to try so hard at doing both right, lol
Look at the real and AI houses @ 9:40 it made me think about why the ai is more tempting. It is familiar, yet different. I think it is all those little design mismatches you point out in the beginning, so it feels like something we've seen all our lives, but a unique version of it. Cus yeah, those two images next to each other, the real one looks real generic, but the AI has a little something else.
Something about this reminds me of the movie her. The architectural aesthetic in that movie feels warm and real but also fake and distant, which I don't think is a coincidence at all, given the movie's themes
“Making real houses look more fake” 😮I know about unrealistic beauty and relationship standards, and now have awareness about how ai (and influencers) may have us spending all of our money and time to achieving the impossible instead of enjoying what we have!
I genuinely enjoyed listening to your video. Your voice is just the right kind of soothing and one of the few where I don't need subtitles to understand what you're saying. Also, you're right about the AI houses. They are beautiful but impossible and can only ever stay as a dream.
This has become a hobby of mine: How fast can I recognize an AI image. answer: pretty fast. For many of the reasons and things you mentioned here. There are so many things off. Textures and geometrical shapes especially. You fill almost always find a sport in the image where the textures and lines are somewhat blurry in a weird way. Shadows sometimes make no sense etc. It's a fun experience to keep my eyes trained for this.
I always adore your video essays. I love your script/narration, it’s so on-point. Love your humour, specificity and accessible engaging presentation of research, history and analysis! Love your visuals to support what you’re saying as well.
My dream house is real, it's in my hometown and I have been obsessed with it for 25 years. Cut to 2024, it was sold to a drugstore chain and now it's where I buy my antidepressants lol
Let's Go O's! 🧡🖤 I don't think Camden Yards (where the Orioles play) has any oriel windows, which is a missed opportunity for an architecture inside joke.
The way people would choose the Ai house vs the real house, shows how well this tecnology works. It enable us to create a more idilical world than what we live in, like if we could make it more perfect. But we sacrifice reality, with its measures and stuff like gravity for aesthetic. And I think it is really sad, that we as people prefer the aesthetic provided by something false, but it really make sense if you think how we use our internet persona in social media, where we sacrifice realness for the ilusion of a perfect life.
@_@ Awwwww! The REAL house 8:31, is *so* much like my old house that I loved so much! I commented once before on your channel about it. I wish there was a way to post pictures back to you! This one looks a little better than mine did, but if I had more time with mine I would have got it to this point of exquisiteness. Mine was in Oregon, built in 1892 in a farmhouse style. So this one being in Washington State, built jin 1889 seems like it must have been the style in the Pacific Northwest particularly at that time. But for those who prefer cottage Victorians, look up 430 Clayton St., Montgomery, Alabama. I was trying to find, on google maps street view, where my great-great aunt and uncle lived, and it's not there now, but this is the house next door. So adorable! I've seen some like this in California, but not with the really tall windows. I have to wonder, if you could find someone who could build in the old style, with lath and plaster walls, would it be even more astronomically expensive than finding an already existing Victorian?
Is getting someone who could build in the old style astronomically expensive? Yes, but the really hard part is finding them. The best ones don't advertise. They don't even have listed phone numbers.
Fantastic video! AI is getting crazy with its capabilities. And LOL, as soon as you showed samples from the Downing book, I thought to myself, "I want to build that in the Sims!" :D
I think something about the real house, you can tell just by looking at it that people live/used to live there. In order to interact with this house, there are people you need to interface with, reminders of practical, real life things. Something about the AI house looks like it's just a perfect home magicked into existence, with no history or owners, no logistics to worry about, and it's just waiting for you to come live your happy life in it. I've gotten pretty good at spotting these photos but I still get got occasionally.
I've noticed a lot of AI pictures look okay~ish on the phone, but spell is immediately broken when you look at them with a decently-sized monitor. You don't even have to squint, the irregularities are apparent. Neural networks make very different mistakes compared to artists or wear and tear of the real objects and buildings. Neural network images also fail at complex symmetrical patterns seen from different angles, they just draw a new blob, that is similar.
