A redditor claims to have found a horrifying, AI-generated, multi-limbed figure in a rental house listing photo and it's exactly the sort of Phasmophobia-style jump scare I didn't need this morning

Picture the scene: You're scrolling away through rental property photos late at night, trying to sort through the ambitious photography and overly-cheery copy to find somewhere new to live.

This one's too small. This one's too expensive. This one... this one looks pretty good, actually. I wonder if the bathroom's a good size. Yep, full tub, integrated units and... HOLY MOLY.

Looking through pictures of a rental house. from r/Weird

Yep, that's an AI-generated demon alright (via Futurism). Redditor jininberry claims to have found the photo while scrolling through rental property listings, and the more you stare at it, the more it reveals itself to be wrong on all sorts of levels.

Let's ignore the multi-limbed horror that appears to be crawling through some impossible wall geometry for a moment. Try, at least. A closer look at the image reveals more and more artifacts that can only be the work of our good friend, artificial-not-so-intelligence.

Check out the pattern on that cushion, for example, placed oddly on a box in the middle of the floor. It's got all kinds of warping and blurring going on towards the back of the print. Or the object on top of the toilet cistern. It looks like hand soap at a distance, but on closer examination, it reveals itself to be an approximation of what hand soap might look like if you spin yourself round in circles after drinking one too many beers.

Or the toilet paper roll making an odd appearance on the left, floating in at a bizarre angle as if to say, "This is definitely a real bathroom, honest."

Or there's Sally there at the back, as I'm affectionately naming it. While the controversy around the use of AI asset generation in games rolls on, I don't think even Phasmophobia's best artists could come up with something quite as horrific as that. I say that as someone who messed with it once, nearly ruined my britches, and endeavoured never to play it again.

In all seriousness, we now live in a world where AI image generation is getting better and better at fooling us into believing fake images are real, but it's somewhat encouraging to see that it's still capable of making large enough mistakes to raise the "oh hell no" flag. Speaking of which, I wonder if the rental agent is wondering why this particular property refuses to budge. Could it be the price? The location? Headwinds in the local market?

Nope. It's Sally. Time to purge this image from my memory, lest my late-night bathroom trips become a little more anxiety-inducing than I'd like.