In Edinburgh, a certain Christina offers a four-bedroom apartment with original wooden floors. There is also a two-bathroom apartment in Gainesville with a double sofa bed and an open kitchen offered by Michel. This beautiful apartment in Berlin has a unique color scheme. In Rome we offer a three-bedroom apartment with all amenities.
There is only one problem with these offers on Airbnb - the online marketplace for listing, searching and short-term rentals of private homes around the world - they just don't exist.
Machine learning
A new website called This Airbnb Is Not Exist uses machine learning to find plausible but slightly incoherent rental offers, from descriptions to pseudo-interior photos. The creator of this site, Christopher Schmidt, was inspired by another site called This Person Is Not Exist - another popular recently emerging site - that uses a neural network to create photographs of non-existent people.
Schmidt trained his Airbnb is Not Exist image generator using a dataset of various apartment interiors and a text generator using existing proposals on real Airbnb. The result: fully furnished digital imagination fantasies.
Plausible enough
Promotional video:
Amazingly, Schmidt had very little experience with machine learning. However, by studying such projects, he said he was able to put together a website that generates highly compelling fictional proposals for apartments and rooms.
“This means that anyone with a couple of hours of free time can create something as compelling as I do,” Schmidt wrote about his project. "While some aspects of my work are downright weak, overall I think it works: the proposals are sometimes dubious, but generally they are believable enough to withstand a cursory examination."