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.”
Some fellow parents praised Bond’s idea in her comments section, commiserating over the high costs of professional school pictures.
“Us moms about to put these school photo [companies] outta business,” one commenter wrote. “Because tell me why it cost me over $100 for my 3 kids AND the photographer doesn’t even care to fix their hair or care if they’re not smiling.”
“This is so real. I have 4. It’s just under $170 for all four digital files,” echoed another commenter.
But Bond’s commenters weren’t all on board with her cost-cutting strategy. Several pointed out that AI platforms like ChatGPT tend to distort images during editing. “Every time I put a photo into ChatGPT it changes how the person looks no matter what I tell it,” one user complained.
Others worried about the implications of feeding photos of children into ChatGPT. “You are putting your children’s image and likeness through AI that can be utilized by AI later and stored in its memory,” one commenter cautioned.
Other parents didn’t use AI to upgrade their own at-home pictures, but to acquire professional pictures without paying full price. Multiple posters on TikTok boasted about asking ChatGPT to remove the watermark from proofs of their children’s pictures, getting high-quality digital versions of the images for free. “No longer getting scammed by the price of school pictures!” reads one user’s caption.
“ChatGPT for the win,” wrote another TikToker with the same strategy. Their post garnered more than a million likes.
How much are parents actually saving by skipping the traditional school picture process? Capturely, a photography company that offers at-home digital shoots, reports that in 2026, the average family is spending between $25 and $60 for a print package, with photos of a single child ranging from $15 to $125.
But removing the watermark from a school picture, whether through AI or other means, could end up being far more costly. Erasing copyright watermarks from photos they haven’t yet purchased is a case of copyright infringement, and if the photo studios pursued legal action, parents could be hit with fines for statutory damages. Those range from a minimum of $750 all the way to $150,000 in extreme cases. School pictures may seem overpriced, but their price tags pale in comparison to the costs a misguided “mom hack” could incur.
