House for Sale: This Week’s AI Images

Last week, my theme was military vehicles. A request for a sonic weapon van disguised as a house for sale became the jumping off point for this week’s series.

My first choice was “a house for sale with a dark secret”. This entire image could work for the cover of a horror novel…called Holes, of course. 

This one is actually scarier. It has a Claymation quality that makes it look malleable and surreal. But the house doesn’t need to be derelict; there’s no objective standard for what signals a “dark secret”. The association comes from popular culture, so the AI is not determining what imagery might convey this, but what imagery the culture trains the public to expect.

From “a house for sale with 800 rooms”. The For Sale part is mostly lost, though the hint of a sign sits at bottom right. But as a magical manor, this creation has plenty of charm…and a rooftop conservatory, which is a real amenity if you’re rich. 800 rooms seems interpreted as just “a lot”; I can count space for fewer than a hundred. 

Another “800 rooms”. This looks like an abandoned 1870s art colony. And all the images I got for this request were gabled houses with palm trees; three had turquoise touches, so the bot assumes big houses are a Florida thing.

Since last week’s vans, and this week’s houses were coming up derelict, as though being sold is associated with being rundown, I tried a request that would rule that out: “a pleasant bungalow for sale”. (The city of Chicago is famous for bungalows. You can click this link to see what they look like.) A Tudor cottage is not a bungalow, though this one is pleasant. Unfortunately, it has either a crematory chimney or an air traffic control tower for a neighbor.

A pleasant-ish bungalow that’s more of a Victorian Bavarian Deconstructivist ranch. The gallery of windows under the gable has a better look of concealing a dark secret than features of the scary houses above.

Finally, I switched to “a real estate agent sells an empty lot to a couple”. (Presumably, you could fix weird hands, and other bot effects, with photo editing software.)

The perfect spot for the home they’re hoping to build. (Note the agent’s two mouths.)