By Kevin Hawkins with Korey Hawkins | Vol. 2 Post 41

REAL AI is a human-created weekly roundup of all things related to artificial intelligence in real estate and emerging AI innovations in other sectors likely to impact our industry. We post a new edition every Friday, and our free newsletter is delivered every Monday.

Stranger DangerAI Stranger Danger

We sometimes are at once AI advocates and alarmists. For the real estate industry, that’s a good thing.

It’s essential to showcase AI’s enormous benefits to our industry as this is only the early days of widely adopted AI. Compared to nearly every other business sector, we’ve been one of the fastest grassroots adopters of Gen AI and computer vision.

But with the good, there also is the bad, and worse, the ugly. We also must spotlight the nasty side of AI.

Several AI advancements and incidents of nefarious use caught our eye this week. Real estate agents need to be aware of these developments. The acceleration of AI development is not slowing down, so keeping up is becoming even more vital.

On the shady side, computer security firm Cato Networks published a report about uncovering a new bad actor selling a deepfake tool on the dark web that helps cybercriminals beat two-factor authentication, which would accelerate fraud attacks at a whole new level.

Using AI, they create fake documents, such as a passport. Axios reports that if live proof of a human is required as part of authentication, the bad actors create a deepfake video that matches the made-up person on the passport. They also make the deepfake video appear livestreamed from a smartphone, which fools the automated agent that approves the credentials!

A new vocabulary is emerging from AI-fueled bad actors: in addition to ransomware, we also have data poisoning, model inversion attacks, identity fraudsters, and pig-butchering. AI will keep Webster’s Dictionary publisher busy with all the new terms to describe this emboldened criminal activity that knows no borders.

Even remarkable breakthroughs are giving us pause. Reports of Google’s one-click AI podcast creator are streaming in, and the reports are both incredible – and scary. Google’s NotebookLM is an audio generator that allows you to make a podcast from artificial intelligence.

Techradar reports they fed it a single blog post (from the Tai Chi Notebook), and AI created an entire podcast from the blog on YouTube. The voices are not real people. Check it out here.

Yes, this could be an AI game-changer, but as Tech Radar’s Graham Barlow notes, “I tried Google’s one-click AI podcast creator, and now I don’t know what’s real anymore.” We tested it ourselves with last week’s REAL AI edition and feel the same way.

And therein lies a huge problem: the better AI gets, the harder it is to determine what is real and what is fake. Don’t be surprised if legislators make much more noise about legislating gates and guardrails. (-Kevin)

AI Liner NotesAI Liner Notes

AI’s Nobel Rise as Google Blushes: Two 2024 Nobel Prizes awarded this week for Chemistry and Physics featured work in artificial intelligence. Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper are two of the three laureates awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2024. They used AI to design new proteins – the building blocks of life. Also, Geoffrey Hinton, a former Google researcher dubbed the “Godfather of AI,” won the Nobel prize for physics with U.S. scientist John Hopfield. Their early discoveries in machine learning helped create our current AI boom. 

CoreLogic officially announces Araya: We wrote about the AI-enabled platform debut at Blueprint, showcasing what happens when you combine the most powerful, comprehensive, and current data with artificial intelligence. If you get a chance to test Araya in person, it will be worth standing in line to search your home address and see the incredible detail it has about where you live. Trust me. 

Apple AI for real estate agents: Check out the blog post on RE Technology from Florida Realtors’ Tech Helpline, “A look at the new iPhone 16, iOS 18 Update and AI features.” It’s a comprehensive look at the phone most Realtors have in their pocket or purse.

16 ways AI is being used in real estate: This is a pretty solid overview of how real estate is using AI in residential and commercial real estate: Listing Descriptions, Virtual Property Tour, Virtual Staging, Lead Generation, Property Management, Fraud and Compliance Detection, Property Search, Automating Due Diligence, Property Analysis, Customer Support, Intelligent Data Processing, Predictive Analytics, Portfolio Optimization, Lease Management and Documentation, Automated Property Valuation, and Tenant Behavior Analysis. (-Kevin)

AI FactsAI Facts and Stats

  1. 90% of Fortune 1000 company executives said they were increasing investments in AI – Wavestone
  2. 49% of content marketers admitted to using AI to write short articles – Semrush
  3. 70% of LinkedIn subscribers have experimented with its AI tools – LinkedIn
  4. 58% of B2B marketers feel optimistic about utilizing AI in their work – Statista
  5. 42% of marketing managers and execs said they use AI to create social media captions – CreatorIQ

Source: Influencer Marketing Hub (-Korey)

AI HeadlinesTake 5 AI Headlines

Using AI to buy your home? These companies think it’s time you should | 10/7/24 USA Today
AI Realtor? Hardly, but USA Today takes the clickbait to write about failing tech models.

What Do Instagram Influencers Think about AI? | 10/7/24 Social Media Today
Content creators and influencers are looking for new ways to utilize AI.

Meta Just Announced 2 New AI Video Features for Advertisers | 10/8/24 Inc.
Meta hopes to roll out Video Expansion and Image Animation early next year.

Adobe unveiled a new tool to help protect artist’s work from AI – and it’s free | 10/9/24 ZDNET
A new tool helps artists get credit for their work and not have it swiped by AI models.

The pace of AI is challenging mortgage and real estate execs | 10/10/24 HousingWire
Tech execs discuss adapting to the rapid pace of change. (-Korey)

AI Quote of the WeekDemis Hassabis Google Nobel Prize DeepMind

Subscribe to our free REAL AI newsletter here.

Content suggestions welcomed: email korey@wavgroup.com.