This is the homeowning task I didn’t expect ChatGPT to handle well

Sometimes, I do find myself sitting around and being amazed by technology. Being able to download music to a phone or video call someone hundreds of miles away is still a pleasant surprise. This definitely shows my age, as I remember dial-up internet and loving my TalkBoy when I was a kid. But I’m constantly thinking about how lucky we are to live in the time we do.

Arguably, the biggest technological advancements in recent memory fall under the constantly changing umbrella of AI. Generative AI has become one of the most used technologies today and corporations are banking on the tech in a big way. For me, I like to try and keep things simple. I use LLMs and AI assistants from time to time to help me with different tasks, like sharpening the tone of an email or organizing data from a spreadsheet. ChatGPT has helped me visualize the future of my home.

Image rendering has been a fun way to use ChatGPT

It helps us figure out how to decorate

When we bought our house, we knew we wanted to do some major redecorating. There weren’t full renovations that needed to be done right away, but we eventually wanted to put our own twist on the home.

I painted every room white when we moved in, mainly to get rid of some of the color choices that we disliked from the previous owner. But this also gave us a blank canvas on which we could choose what to do. In the room that was my office for the first few years of living here, I painted it a dark blue.

But, once we found out we were having a little boy and would need that room for a nursery, it became clear that the room was a bit too dark for a baby. So, we set out to figure out what color would look best and how could we possibly decorate it.

Using ChatGPT’s image rendering software, we cycled through many different color options by uploading a photo of the room as is and then writing a prompt that suggested a new color. Eventually, we settled on a lighter blue and painted it that shade.

Once that was taken care of, we went back to ChatGPT to try and figure out the best ways to decorate the walls. I’m a big New York Yankees fan, so I wanted my son to have a Yankees picture on his wall. So I figured why not see what a few might look like on his wall?

Entering the prompt “Add pictures of Yankees stadium on the wall to the right of the crib going right next to it until you reach near the top of the wall. To the left of those pictures, add a painting of a dog,” gave us the top image above. ChatGPT grabbed a few photos of Yankee Stadium, added Babe Ruth’s plaque from Monument Park, and added a lovely picture of a dog next to it all.

Having it create renderings of what a room could look like has been a use for ChatGPT that my wife and I have enjoyed utilizing. It’s helped us not only visualize what the room might be but also what kind of accents or pieces we should be adding to the room to make it so.

It can give you a different point of view

This can help you see a room in a completely different way

Our family room downstairs has a fireplace which we mounted a TV on. It’s a great focal point of the room and the Samsung The Frame TV has added both color and design, thanks to its ability to show paintings.

However, there are blank spaces next to the fireplace where we haven’t quite figured out how to decorate yet. Our Wi-Fi router has been placed to the left of the TV because that’s where the hook-up is. But that doesn’t mean that it only needs to be sitting there forever.

Asking ChatGPT to imagine some shelving to the left helped us decide that we definitely want to turn that wall into some kind of built-in shelving unit. We have a ton of books that are still in boxes years after we’ve moved, mainly because we can’t find a place to put them.

With this rendering, it opens up the possibilities of finding the right kind of shelving. What I like about ChatGPT is that I can upload a photo of a room and ask it to change things about the room. But I can also add photos of other items, say a set of shelves I found from IKEA, and ask the chatbot to add those specific shelves into the rendering.

ChatGPT doesn’t only have to help you with questions

But it can do that as well

Is ChatGPT perfect? Far from it. I recently asked it to show me a photo of what my house would look like with black shudders and it turned the house black on the outside.

The photo renderings are never going to be perfect and it’s important to know that going in. What I need from it is an offering that helps my creative juices flow. As a visual learner, it helps me to picture how something might look before I decide on it.

I’ve played around with ChatGPT in other ways, incorporating it into some workflows to speed up the research process as well as helping me sort through a budget in seconds. We opted to compare how the naming options for our son might sound alongside the name of our daughter’s. ChatGPT produced many comparisons as to why certain names worked with hers and others didn’t. This was an informative prompt that I never would’ve thought about years ago.

What I’ve learned is being more specific with the prompts usually nets the better results. Leaving things up to interpretation can result in an answer you don’t want or need. But using this has been a fun change in technology for me.

I’ll continue to use ChatGPT and other LLMs

I still want to think for myself a lot of the time. But I do see the value in asking the AI for some help once in a while, especially with decorating around the house. Having it make renders of how the rooms could look has been a huge help, as it provides us with a foresight that’s hard to imagine in our minds. ChatGPT has made it easy to get the kind of answer we want and I look forward to continuing to ask it how to improve my home.

OS

Android, iOS, Web

Developer

OpenAI

Price model

Free with optional subscription