- UK agencies warn parents about sharing their children’s photos online due to a rise in cases of AI being used to generate child sexual abuse material from publicly available images.
- They advise tightening privacy settings, reviewing old posts, and restricting who can view children’s images.
Parents are being urged to rethink how they share photographs of their children online after UK child protection agencies – National Crime Agency (NCA) and the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) warned that advances in AI are making it easier for criminals to create child sexual abuse material (CSAM) from ordinary publicly available images.
The advice reflects growing concern that many parents are unaware of how AI technology can be misused. Investigators say offenders no longer need direct contact with children to create abusive material, as sophisticated image-generation tools are capable of manipulating photographs already available online.
“We encourage parents and carers to take a few simple steps today,” said Tim Wright, a senior manager at the NCA.
The guidance centres on three main recommendations: checking social media privacy settings, reviewing who has access to children’s photographs, and discussing consent before images are shared by individuals or organisations.
Parents are also encouraged to examine older posts and decide whether they remain comfortable with them being publicly available. The guidance advises reviewing photographs shared by relatives or friends, considering whether images reveal identifying details such as a child’s face, body or school uniform, and reassessing permissions previously granted to schools, nurseries and sports clubs to publish photographs.
Officials say these precautions have become increasingly important as AI tools have become more widely available. According to the NCA, many parents are unaware that publicly shared photographs can be copied and manipulated into child sexual abuse material without any direct interaction between offenders and victims.
“The average parent or carer does not post a picture of a child online thinking that it might be scraped to be turned into CSAM,” said Lorna Sinclair, a child sexual abuse education manager at the NCA. “There are lots of parents and carers who do not know that this problem exists.”
The IWF said it recorded a 14% increase in AI-generated child sexual abuse material during 2025, identifying 8,029 realistic AI-created images and videos over the course of the year. The organisation has also handled reports involving children who were blackmailed after AI was used to produce fake explicit images from ordinary photographs.
Through its Report Remove service, it has received cases in which fully clothed selfies were digitally manipulated into extreme pornographic content.
The issue has also emerged in cases supported by Childline. In one instance, a 15-year-old girl reported that a stranger had created a “really convincing” fake nude image using photographs of her face and bedroom that had apparently been taken from her Instagram account.
The publication of the guidance follows incidents in which photographs taken from UK school websites were scraped by blackmailers, manipulated using AI and then used to threaten schools.
In response, the Early Warning Working Group, whose members include the NCA and IWF, has advised schools to remove identifiable images of pupils from websites and social media wherever possible.
Dan Sexton, the IWF’s chief technology officer, acknowledged the difficulty of advising parents against publicly sharing photographs of their children but argued that the current threat leaves little alternative.
“I don’t know what else to say to parents,” he said.
“I would be very cautious [about putting pictures of children online] because there is no protection.”
The NSPCC similarly recommends that children and young people keep their social media accounts private. As part of the campaign, the NCA and IWF have released videos illustrating everyday situations in which parents might photograph their children, encouraging families to think carefully before sharing those images online and reassuring both parents and children that it is acceptable to say “no” if they are uncomfortable with a photograph being published.
Tom Dyson, the IWF’s head of marketing, said parents retain the right to request the removal of photographs from websites and social media platforms where they have previously given permission.
“If you want a photograph of your children to be taken off a website or social media, you are perfectly able to do that.”
Child protection agencies and tech companies are being given the tools to assess whether AI tools can produce CSAM. Last year, ministers said this was being done to prevent abuse before it occurred.
