TL;DR
The UK’s National Crime Agency and Internet Watch Foundation have warned parents not to publicly post children’s images, citing AI-generated abuse imagery. The IWF found 8,029 AI-generated abuse images and videos in 2025, up 14%, with AI abuse videos rocketing from 13 to 3,440 in a year. New joint guidance tells parents to lock down privacy settings and audit old posts.
Parents should stop publicly posting images of their children online because of the growth of AI-generated abuse imagery, the UK’s National Crime Agency has warned. The agency issued the advice alongside the Internet Watch Foundation, the charity responsible for finding and removing child sexual abuse material online.
The IWF identified 8,029 AI-generated images and videos of realistic child sexual abuse in 2025, a 14% rise on the year before. Video is where the growth is starkest, up from just 13 confirmed AI-generated abuse videos in 2024 to 3,440 last year.
Such imagery is treated as child sexual abuse material under UK law, regardless of how it was made. “While we and policing colleagues tackle offenders, prevention remains vital,” said Tim Wright, a senior manager at the NCA.
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The joint guidance asks parents to review privacy settings and restrict posts to trusted groups, such as a “close friends” list. It also suggests auditing older posts for identifying details, like a child’s face or school uniform, and revisiting consent given to schools and clubs that photograph children.
From sharenting to synthetic abuse
Warnings about “sharenting”, a term that entered the Collins English Dictionary in 2016, have circulated for years over identity theft and privacy. AI tools that can convincingly manipulate photos have turned an old worry into something sharper.
The IWF has previously reported a case in which a criminal gang scraped pupils’ photos from a school website and used AI to create more than 100 sexual images of the children. Its data also shows the harm is heavily gendered, with 98% of confirmed AI abuse imagery in 2024 involving girls where sex was recorded.
Children themselves are alert to the threat, with UNICEF research finding a quarter of children fear their images being turned into explicit deepfakes. Campaigners have long pushed for stronger European tools against nonconsensual deepfake imagery.
Regulation catching up
The UK government has moved to ban so-called nudification apps and adjusted the law so AI firms can test whether their systems can be abused to produce such material. The IWF, which campaigned for the ban, has described the apps as products with no reason to exist.
Ofcom is meanwhile enforcing the Online Safety Act, opening a child safety investigation into Telegram after probes of X and Grok. Ministers are also weighing an under-16 social media ban.
The wider deepfake reckoning, from celebrities to schoolchildren, has already forced lawmakers to move faster than they planned. The NCA guidance shifts some of that urgency to the family photo album.
“These are not hypothetical threats, they are real,” said IWF chief executive Kerry Smith, stressing that the aim is informed sharing with trusted people rather than no sharing at all. The advice, in the end, is less about panic than about shrinking the pool of raw material.
