Your AI-Generated Dream Home Won't Ever Exist — The Slow Erosion of the Line Between "Visual Fantasy" and Reality, Explained by a Designer
"A beautiful image says nothing about whether the person who made it can do any of that," writes SPELK.'s founding designer Kelly Smith
We've been interior designers for around two decades, long enough to see the industry change. We used to have clients come in with mood boards made from torn magazine pages. Later, they brought Pinterest boards — more or less the same thing, but digitized. Now they arrive with fully-formed visuals of their rooms, created by AI from a photograph and a prompt. "Can you make that?" they ask.
The answer, in many cases, is no. The exact sofa can't be purchased because it doesn't exist; the layout doesn't meet building regulations. The furniture construction is unachievable — doors can't physically open, drawers have nowhere to slide into. These clients don't set out to bring a fiction to their interior designer; they just choose an image that looks good. The problem is that nowadays, what looks good was never built or purchased. It existed in cyberspace for about as long as it took someone to type a prompt.
This is the frontline of AI's arrival in the interior design industry. Not robots designing houses — we're some way off that — but a slow erosion of the line between visual fantasy and what can be achieved in reality. It is a shift that's redefining what the 'design process' looks like, and in some cases, fooling people into believing non-existent work is real. The real issue is that 80% of interior design isn't design: it's scheduling, procurement, budgeting, building regulations, negotiating with a plumber at 7 am. A beautiful image says nothing about whether the person who made it can do any of that.
Life and creative partners Kelly and Graeme Smith founded SPELK. to "design for real rooms and real lives, not for trends or quick impact": their work starts with context — "how things are used, lived with, worn in, passed on.."
Most people posting AI interiors aren't purposely trying to deceive anyone. Designers rely on their online portfolios to attract clients, and the social media algorithm is a beast that constantly needs feeding. Interior design projects are slow and expensive, so there aren't new photographs every week.
And so, yes, the temptation to post AI for likes and clicks is ever-present, particularly for newcomers wanting to get a foot in the industry without many — or any — fully executed commissions and trying to maximize their chances. As the saying goes, you've got to start somewhere, and what better place than the globally connected, ever-online internet?
We’re not going to pretend our interior design studio never posts an AI image. If we share a 3D visualization or concept, we caption it clearly as AI. But people don't always read captions; they scroll quickly and assume. Clients themselves are showing us boards where they've unknowingly pinned AI images created by others.
This means we spend quite a bit of time explaining to people why the thing they fell in love with cannot exist in three dimensions in their actual house. That's a new and slightly absurd part of the job of being an interior designer. It also means finding new ways to convey to potential clients that we have real-world experience of building and managing, not just prompting. And that, at the end of the day, it's that hands-on experience that makes a tasteful home possible.
"We photograph builds mid-construction. We film our photographer on site, because video is more difficult to convincingly fabricate than a still image, and because it proves that a human being was standing in that room with a camera," Smith explains.
Image credit: SPELK.
When trying to spot whether a studio has completed a project IRL or simply envisioned it with AI, extreme tidiness and a lack of behind-the-scenes shots should also be seen as red flags. That's why "we've stopped tidying every surface. It is inequivocable details like these that demonstrate that a room exists in the real, not just in the digital," adds the designer.
Image credit: SPELK.
It is in this evolving landscape that we've had to become evangelists for the unfinished and the imperfect. One of the major tells of AI is a suspicious flawlessness, so our answer has been to lean hard into that 'time-poor' mess. We photograph builds mid-construction, specifically because AI images tend to show only the completed end state. We film our photographer on site, because video is more difficult to convincingly fabricate than a still image, and because it proves that a human being was standing in that room with a camera. We put ourselves in the photos too, because the human brain evolved to spot a wrong face more easily than a wrong chair.
We've also stopped tidying every surface for the final shot. A stack of post, a coat draped over a chair, even a smudge of dust that we might have previously edited out of the final photograph — it is unexpected yet inequivocable details like these that demonstrate that a room exists in the real, not just in the digital.
It's also given us an eye for the fakes themselves — and for knowing when there's no point looking for a light fixture that never existed. Sometimes we look at metadata embedded in AI images, but that's easy to strip out. Social media platforms are beginning to run their own detection models, and they ask users to self-tag AI content, though this remains optional.
At first glance, this image might look spotless, but a closer look reveals the inaccurate reflection in the TV screen, a book blurring into the coffee table, and a weirdly pictured door in the background.
There's now a legal backdrop to this too: the EU AI Act, the European Union's regulatory framework for AI use, which has fully entered into force this August, requires AI-generated content to be disclosed. Under this law, AI images intended for any purpose other than artistic, creative, satirical, or fictional works have to feature both a machine-readable and human-perceptible watermark, making them instantly recognizable to computers and people alike.
The UK has no equivalent statute, and there's currently no legal requirement here for an AI image to be labeled at all — the caption is entirely a matter of the poster's conscience. Of course, none of this is foolproof. It's an arms race between people who want to present AI images as real and people who want to identify them as AI, and we're not confident anyone will win outright. And that's precisely why, increasingly, we think the better answer isn't to interrogate the image at all. It's to interrogate the source.
Print is having something of a resurgence for exactly this reason: it's expensive, slow, and edited by humans with professional reputations at stake, which makes it a comparatively hard medium to flood with fakes. Professional body membership works in a similar way. For instance, a member of the British Institute of Interior Design must have a minimum of six years' verified experience in the real world — not a guarantee against AI use, but a guarantee that there is an experienced studio behind every post.
The real-life detailing of SPELK.'s physical projects, on the other hand, looks extra crisp caught on camera, filled with natural shadows, light, and texture.
Image credit: SPELK.
In the picture(s): their Social Club furniture range, a ten-piece, yet-to-launch furniture collection whose first two items, a dining table and a stool, are available to pre-order now.
Image credit: SPELK.
It is the little(st) things, like veins in cabinetry and the cut of joinery, that can help you distinguish between the real and the AI-fabricated.
Image credit: SPELK.
Something different has to be said about CGI, which involves a human artist building a 3D model by hand and painstakingly layering in texture, reflection, and shadow. It's a laborious and skilled craft which, if done well, makes the result very hard to distinguish from a real photograph.
This can be genuinely good: a manufacturer who would have once built and then landfilled a full photography set can now generate the same imagery at a fraction of the cost and waste. CGI is also far more expensive and time-consuming than AI, which has always been a natural limit on its use. AI, with its instant, unlimited output, simply doesn't have this guardrail.
A vibrant CGI design by The Unbuilt, a leading studio in this fast-advancing sector.
We asked a CGI studio about what they think sets their visual assets apart from what AI produces. The answer was instructive:
"AI still struggles with the fundamentals of physical accuracy," Simon Green of The Unbuilt, a CGI studio in County Durham, tells me. "At a glance, AI-generated images can look impressive, but the cracks show as soon as you study the details: misaligned lines, inconsistent woodgrain, impossible geometry, and physics that simply doesn't behave. Objects float, intersect, melt into each other, or ignore weight and structure entirely. These issues are improving rapidly, but for now they remain the clearest giveaways."
If you want to play this game yourself — and it is worth playing, given how much money is at stake in renovating your home — the tells are less dramatic than you'd think. It's rarely one glaring error, but an accumulation of small ones.
Perfection itself is suspicious: real rooms are asymmetric and imperfect, often including objects that don't fit with the scheme, or even a tiny bit of dirt.
Shadows and reflections may be subtly incorrect; a shadow may fall in the wrong direction from a light source, or a reflection may show something the room doesn't contain. Items may appear in illogical places — there might be a fruit bowl on top of the hob, appliances might be weirdly placed. Perhaps, instead, there might be a tap with no sink.
Then there are things that couldn't exist in the real world: a drawer with nowhere to put a drawer box, a door that would strike the island if it ever opened, or a staircase that leads into a blank wall.
Another inaccurately generated AI image, with two taps, a strange door, and small details that, zooming in, you won't fail to spot as wrong, including the shadows.
Often, though, identifying AI requires looking closely. Surfaces may blur where they meet, and small structural details go wrong: window panes of different sizes, mismatched angles, a chair missing a leg. And while the latest models have become significantly better at generating accurate text, they still often focus on large or important words and fail to produce minor lettering in the background correctly.
These are the sort of details you only catch when you look carefully, which is precisely why everyone misses them when they're quickly scrolling past images on a tiny phone screen.
Of course, AI will keep improving, and fakes will get harder to spot. But we don't think the answer is to panic. We do, however, think this is the moment the interior design industry needs to get serious about proving its work rather than simply depicting it — through video, through mess, through membership, and increasingly, through showing the unglamorous, unphotogenic 80% of the job that no prompt has yet learned to fake.
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