UK warns parents to stop posting children's photos amid AI abuse fears

To tackle or prevent online child abuse, the UK regulatory authorities are urging parents to stop posting images of their children amid rising fears of AI based abuse.

According to a landmark guidance issued to tackle the rise of AI-generated sexual abuse material, Parents should not put photos of their children on public display online.

The recommendation has come from the National Crime Agency NCA and the Internet Watch Foundation IWF, which fear that most people are unaware of the dangers posed by paedophiles and criminal networks.

They suggest that parents and guardians make their social media accounts private or share pictures of their children through a “close friends” group.

The NCA and the IWF stressed they were not telling parents how to behave online, but said they should be aware of the problem and how to tackle it.

The guidance also recommends auditing social media accounts for old pictures that could be used by predators and revisiting photo consent agreements for instance with schools or sports clubs that could have been signed before breakthroughs in AI made image manipulation possible.

“We encourage parents and caretakers to take a few simple steps today,” said Tim Wright, a senior manager at the NCA following a new guideline.

The guidance sets out a trio of actions: checking privacy settings on social media accounts; reviewing who can see images of their children; and having open discussions about giving permission for people and organizations to publish images online.

The NCA said most parents and caretakers would not be aware that advances in the technology had given criminals publicly available tools to create child sexual abuse material (CSAM) without needing to contact – or “groom” – victims directly.

It comes as the IWF, which monitors CSAM incidents and runs a reporting hotline, has been contacted by under-18s who have been blackmailed by extortionists after their images were nudified by AI.

A confidential service for removing explicit images of under-18s taken without their consent, called Report Remove, has also reported examples of image manipulation involving normal, fully-clothed selfies being converted into extreme pornography via AI.

Notably, IWF, which identified 8,029 AI-made images and videos of realistic CSAM in 2025, informed the amount of AI-generated child sexual abuse material found online rose by 14% last year which sounds alarming for parents and the innocents.

As reported by the Guardian, the new guidance also follows cases where UK school websites were targeted by blackmailers who scraped pictures of children, used AI tools to convert them into child sexual abuse material, and then threatened to publish the results.