Metropolis The Housing Market Is Already Terrible. A.I. Is Making It Even Worse. While digital staging is nothing new to real estate, bot-made listings are forcing homebuyers and professionals to ask themselves if this is a straight-up deceptive practice. DeAnn Wiley was on the hunt for a new rental in Detroit earlier this month when she had the displeasure of arriving at a property that looked nothing like what was advertised online. "The photos made the home look brand new, only to get there and see the usual wear and tear and the old'landlord special,' " she told Slate.

Dark patterns are deceptive user interfaces employed by e-commerce websites to manipulate user's behavior in a way that benefits the website, often unethically. This study investigates the detection of such dark patterns. Existing solutions include UIGuard, which uses computer vision and natural language processing, and approaches that categorize dark patterns based on detectability or utilize machine learning models trained on datasets. We propose combining web scraping techniques with fine-tuned BERT language models and generative capabilities to identify dark patterns, including outliers. The approach scrapes textual content, feeds it into the BERT model for detection, and leverages BERT's bidirectional analysis and generation abilities. The study builds upon research on automatically detecting and explaining dark patterns, aiming to raise awareness and protect consumers.