The framed school photo on the mantlepiece is a “familiar fixture of family life”, said The Times, but the annual push to encourage your child to smile nicely for the school photographer may soon be no more.
The school photography industry is “under threat”, and the main culprits are parents using artificial intelligence tools to scrub the watermarks from photographers’ proofs or previews, and print off photographs without paying. Nearly 60% of school photographers say they have “lost commissioned work to AI”, and more than two-thirds have “experienced copyright infringement”, according to the Association of Photographers.
Prices ‘can run up’
The average spend on a single school photo is £25 but, if you want extra copies for relatives, or fall for added extras like turning the picture “into a magnet, keyring or snow globe”, prices “can run up” to £100 or more, said The Guardian.
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Parents are increasingly baulking at shelling out for “mundane headshots” when it’s so easy to use AI tools to erase the photographer’s watermark and get the pictures for free, said Futurism. Some are even opting to “fast-track school picture day” altogether by taking their own photos of their children and then “tossing them into ChatGPT, with a prompt” to “make it look like a school picture”. The tool then adds that “milquetoast background” school photographers so favour, and you’re done.
Privacy concerns
The big catch with this approach is that your child’s face “may not survive the edit”, said Gadget Review. Even after “explicitly asking” the chatbot to “preserve” your child’s features, a face “can change during generation”. You may end up with slightly different “eyes, facial proportions, and hairline”.
Uploading your child’s image to an AI chatbot may also “pose a bigger concern”, said USA Today. That image won’t be discarded after you’re done, even if you delete the chat; it will be kept for potential use in training AI to “generate more refined content”. You are “basically seeding your child’s image into a large language model, and who knows how that can be manipulated” in the future, legal expert Daliah Saper told the paper.
And scrubbing watermarks could “end up being far more costly” than paying for the official photo, said US business magazine Fast Company. Doing so is copyright infringement, and photography companies could choose to pursue legal action, hitting parents with fines that could run into hundreds of pounds.
