When I’m not working, you can usually find me drooling over home design magazines, Instagram posts and Pinterest boards. Most of the time, this is pure fantasy. But recently I’ve been seized with a need to spruce up my own space. Suddenly the infinite scroll of soothing interiors has taken on a new hue: What if that was my bookshelf, my organized entryway? I’m blessed with a partner who is incredibly useful in this department, as a designer and fabricator. But when I showed him some of my favorite images from my ever-growing inspo collection, his expertise really burst my bubble. He pointed out that many of the images were AI-generated or -modified, and several of them showed things that weren’t real — what material did I think that marbled orange backsplash was, he asked, because it definitely doesn’t exist in nature — weren’t possible or would cost a fortune to make. But I have to admit: Some of the pictures were very convincing, and it was hard to accept that I couldn’t replicate them in real life.
These kinds of images — which range from banal to bonkers — are now commonplace on Pinterest and the internet more broadly. They’re frustrating some interior design hobbyists while inspiring others and dividing designers themselves. To find out just how much AI is changing home, we spoke to several interiors experts — and one woman who took aesthetic manners into her own hands (with the help of ChatGPT).
AI comes home
When Bianca Read and her husband bought their house in Houston nine years ago, she was excited to decorate it to reflect her tastes. “I’ve been redesigning the home slowly, on my budget,” Read tells Yahoo. She started where I did: Pinterest, social media and blogs, looking for ideas that would suit her and her new home. Read even tried hiring a designer. But when they talked, both Read and the designer were acutely aware of the hourly rate. As a result, their calls felt “rushed,” says Read. “She gave me the ideas, but if I kept asking questions, it would increase the price.” And, as a new homeowner, Read just wasn’t in a position to afford the personalized services of a designer.
Most designers appreciate AI as an efficient way to get ideas. For example, this AI-generated image provides a possible layout for an awkwardly shaped entryway. (AI-generated image by Adobe Firefly)
Then she discovered ChatGPT. Read started uploading photos of the rooms in her house and adding prompts about the look she was going for into the AI chat. At first, ChatGPT returned puzzling images unrelated to what she was looking for. Another AI app she recently tried concocted rooms with windows where no windows should be, a couch on the ceiling and “everything out of place,” says Read. But with patience and practice, she learned how best to prompt ChatGPT to show her what her rooms could become. Now Read has redesigned her bedroom, bathroom and portions of her yard thanks to the help of ChatGPT. Next up, the home office she shares with her husband. “That’s cheaper for me and easier than hiring a designer — that’s the reality of the economy right now,” Read says.
Great expectations
AI isn’t only infiltrating the home inspiration realm. As the Washington Post reported, it’s impacting everyone from hairstylists to wedding planners, who have clients showing up with unrealistic expectations courtesy of ChatGPT, MidJourney, Gemini and the like. Peter Spalding, designer and cofounder of the studio Daniel House Club, speculates that when it comes to interiors, clients had unrealistic expectations for what was possible within their budgets long before AI came along (he blames HGTV).
Photo-realistic inspiration images like this AI-generated bathroom are tantalizing, but sometimes they can “lock” a client into one idea that may not be the best — or most affordable — one, experts say. (AI-generated image by Adobe Firefly)
AI has only made matters worse, fueling the expectation that every project proposal should look like a fully polished, finished home — no matter the budget. Not only is that prohibitively expensive, but “photorealism is not really a good place to start when you are ideating what a project is going to look like,” Spalding tells Yahoo. “That can lock you — or especially a client — into a vision way too quickly, and then they’re disappointed when you rendered a green stool that was not real [but] that they thought they were going to have in their project.”
Spalding, who calls himself old-fashioned, believes that sketches are the best way to get his creative juices flowing, as well as those of his clients, who are primarily other designers.
Designer and AI educator Jenna Gaidusek has honed the skill of expectation management. She uses a custom AI tool she built based on Google’s Gemini to bring visions to life with her clients but forewarns them that some “weirdness” is to be expected.
Democratizing design (somewhat)
AI does have some advantages, however. For example, it’s allowed Gaidusek to scale her business. She now works almost entirely virtually with clients throughout the U.S. and Canada. Gaidusek only does renderings (3D digital drawings that replicate the exact dimensions of a room or building) for an extra charge. Otherwise, she talks to a client about what they want, creates design boards — collages of images that act as color palette, texture and theme inspiration — for their project, then uses those boards, along with prompts, to have her custom AI generate images of the future rooms. “If you want a full render of the space, I can sit here and do that, and it would be to scale but … it could take hours,” she says. “But if you want images to get the idea … we can turn that around so much faster” with the help of AI, she says. And in an industry where most people charge by the hour, time is literally money.
A rendering like this bathroom might take a designer hours of work, but with AI and knowledge of the prompts to use, a tailored inspiration image can be generated in minutes. (AI-generated image by Adobe Firefly)
For novices like myself and Read, using AI for interior design is not just cheap, it’s fun, according to science. Tilanka Chandrasekera, an architect and professor of interior design at Oklahoma State University, has been conducting award-winning research on AI, design and creativity. In one of his studies, he gave three groups — interior designers, designers in other fields and non-designers — an interior design project to complete with the help of AI. Of the three groups, the non-interior designers came up with the most creative projects, and the non-designers were the ones who got the greatest satisfaction out of their AI-assisted work. “What this result says is that there is an opportunity for using these tools, but in order to use them more productively, you need to have some design background,” Chadrasekera tells Yahoo.
Gaidusek has found the same to be true in her work: “Clients are not able to do the things that I can [with AI], because they don’t have the words to articulate” exactly what they want in prompts, she says.
Copy, paste, decorate: the AI interior dilemma
When I was trawling through AI inspiration pictures and playing with tools to generate my own interiors, the results tended to fall into two extremes: either wildly unrealistic (think: plants where no plants could grow, structures I’ve never seen in real life) or extremely … boring. There were trendy modern farmhouse kitchens so bland it was almost comical — and a little creepy. AI is “predictive and looks for patterns, so the hot thing that it’s being flooded with [online] is going to be what you see,” says Gaidusek. “It hasn’t been trained with anything new because we haven’t created it yet.” So, when someone tells AI to “color outside the lines … it really goes out of them,” she says.
AI models generate images based on what’s online, so the interiors can feel plain or too familiar. But sometimes they spit out something strange — see if you can spot it. (AI-generated image by Adobe Firefly)
Since the wild ideas AI comes up with are often impossible to pull off, can people expect more of the same bland, cookie-cutter interiors? Maybe, experts say. But this kind of creative sameness is nothing new. Even though AI has its limitations, it can help spark ideas and show people what’s possible in their space. What it can’t do is replace human designers — or, for that matter, nonprofessionals who want to get creative decorating their own homes — and their unique crafts. At least, not yet.