One signal

A mother told Metro she used an AI tool to remove the watermark from her 18-month-old daughter’s nursery portrait, then printed the result instead of buying the image. She said a digital copy would have cost £19 and a print more than £20.

Photographer Denise Maxwell called watermark removal theft and warned that uploading a child’s picture means handing it to another company. AI safety expert James Vincent told Metro that retention and reuse depend on the tool’s privacy policy, terms and settings. One account is not a measure of how widespread this is, and the article does not establish a legal finding. But it puts two practical questions in the same frame: who pays for the work, and what happens to a child’s image once it is uploaded?

Discuss: Should photographers respond to AI watermark removal by changing how school portraits are sold, or should the main responsibility fall on parents not to use the tools this way?

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