THE AI QUESTION

It’s hard to imagine, sometimes, how a vacant property might look with furniture in it. And I’ve mostly resisted asking AI for assistance. But today, fortified by a game, if flagging, September sun, it occurred to me that if I’m going to use Chatgpt to help diagnose a wonky knee, as well as offer insight into my many persistent neuroses, it only makes sense to have it also make a stab at dressing up the occasional condominium.

I tried it with two different services here. (This is for Unit 61 at Place D’Armes in downtown Kingston.)

The images I paid for - those immediately beside the original shots - are distinctly ordinary. The furnishings seem to float rather than sit firmly on the carpets, as if gravity is optional. The images are suggestive, I suppose, but also distinctly unreal. And uninspiring. They distance me from the reality. So I won’t be doing that again.

The Chatgpt efforts, though, are more convincing, at least to my eye, even with the slightly honeyed and distinctly nostalgic glow. I’d live there, and surely that’s the idea, the goal.

The trouble is, real estate rules dictate that AI-assisted images must avoid “structural drift”. Windows can’t move or change shape, ceilings can’t be lifted or lowered. What’s shown must reflect what would be seen during a viewing. And it’s hard to argue with that position. But AI isn’t supposed to disappear a picture hook, wither, or a nicked baseboard, which strikes me as a bit much. Real estate listings fudge the truth constantly (there I said it). The driving time from downtown, for instance, is shortened far more often than it’s truthfully stated. Stains are hidden under carpets. Art is hung over wounds on the wall. Leaking skylights are dried and touched up the night before an open house. So if the carpet is a shade lighter in the flesh than it appears in an AI conception, I think I’m okay with that. We know it’s not real. The unvarnished, untouched image is right there for comparison. The AI image is merely food for thought, nothing more. It just saves you the twenty minutes on Pinterest as you dream up possible futures for the space.

My guess is that the Chatgpt images I received here would be deemed to have strayed too much, even if they better offer a truer sense of potential. That built-in bookcase has been replaced, after all, and the railings re-stained, perhaps. So it’s complicated. My thinking is this:

1) The truth always lies somewhere outside the frame, and is unknowable in any absolute sense.

2) It would be a serious mistake to assume it (the truth) is contained in the wide-angle colour-balanced images shot on-site for the listing, any more than it is in the AI-assisted version.

3) Find a realtor you trust. Get a good inspector. Believe your own eyes.

NEW LISTING - 187 COLLEGE ST

Tucked into the north-east corner of the College Street circle, this grand four-bedroom home is making its first appearance on the market in more than a half-century. I’ll run an open house on the weekend.

NEW LISTING - 306 GLENGARRY ROAD

I live downtown and don’t see that changing. But Strathcona Park is a fine nearby alternative, with its up-and-down topography, as if rivers raged through steep gorges at some distant moment, long before its big trees took root, and the plentiful parks were imagined. 306 Glengarry is a fine brick home on a deep treed lot connecting directly to the park. I’d sneak in a gate, or improve my hurdling.

1153 HAROLD BURKE ROAD

263 Acres just north of Mountain Grove. Forest and meadow, fields and hills. Great lengths of Sharbot Creek. Deer and bears and pike and eagle. Butterfly and stoat. A blue-roofed farmhouse end of a gravel road. A Rogers tower over yonder hill and providing a steady income.

436 DIVISION ST

The sellers installed their son in this fine three-bedroom semi-detached home close to the downtown core, and spent almost $120,000 making the place right. Which means there really is nothing for you to do but collect a return on their investment.

2355 RAYMO RD - RE-LISTED AT A NEW PRICE

Fifty glorious off-grid acres of forest and granite, pond and excellent cabin (and bunkie) and solar power and jaw-dropping night skies.

625 KING ST W IN GANANOQUE

A Gananoque triplex of almost 4000 sf. Not to mention eight bedrooms and 2.5 storeys. A blend of the very new and the character-full Victorian. The young whippersnapper and the grizzled veteran.

1 PLACE D’ARMES #61

A spacious townhouse condominium in Frontenac Village with direct access to the pool via a lovely terrace with apple tree.

135 JAMES ST

It’s always reminded me of a farmhouse, some clapboard remnant of Kingston’s sparser past, but I’m dead wrong, apparently. Still a fascinating Inner Harbour property, full of possibility and

AMHERST ISLAND ACREAGE

I first walked these 98 acres with the seller back in the fall of 2025 and haven’t stopped thinking about them since. I clambered down to the shoreline other side of the road, dug shards of pottery from the cliff, stared south (a little sadly) towards America. Afterwards I walked to the pond near the back of the land and marvelled at the variety of landscapes I’d moved through. There was something surreal about the experience, as if I was as likely to run into cheetah or hyena as I was tweed-clad birder. I could breathe better, and think more clearly. I wanted to both laugh and cry, sleep and run.

He was as lost as a man can be. Drugged, must be, and ripped from Marlboro-yellow snug in muggiest corner of downtown’s black-stone tavern, then press-ganged mid-night onto tin ferryboat and plundered rough-shod across inland sea. Deposited here come sunrise, shoeless, atop a desperate thin skin of Amherst’s angel field, with no more company than that haggard, lame excuse for a hanging tree, and the oily deathscream of necky cormorant, bovver-boy skua.

RECENTLY SOLD

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