‘ChatGPT for the win’: Parents are using AI to skip out on children’s school photo day

With a new school year underway, kids everywhere are saying cheese for school picture day—but some penny-pinching parents are cutting photographers out of the equation. In their place, those parents are employing artificial intelligence to generate picture day-style images of their children. Others are getting their kids’ pictures taken as normal, but avoiding paying for the final images by having AI agents erase watermarks from the proofs. Both methods may be cheaper than shelling out for professional pictures, but they come with their own hidden costs. On TikTok, user Carlie Bond went viral for what she tagged as a #MomHack: taking photos of her three school-age children against a plain backdrop, then putting them into ChatGPT with the prompt, “Keep them exactly the same but make it look like a school picture.” ChatGPT added a standard gradient backdrop to each image, making them look much like the standard school pictures from leading companies like Lifetouch and CADY Studios. “School pictures x3 kids?? In this economy?” Bond wrote in her caption. “So we took our own and let my good friend Chat help us out 🤭 And honestly… I’m not mad about how they turned out.” @carlieb0nd Sch…