Their PR is just breathtaking in its ineptitude - all the speculation about Kate already and so they go and throw petrol on the fire. I'm afraid that this also reflects really badly on Prince William personally, who supposedly took the picture and let it be published knowing it was inaccurate.
The main PR message that shines through all this is an extreme arrogance and condescension from the palace towards the "common folk". They refused to provide any detail, aside from stating it wasn't cancer in which case the worst case scenario has been ruled out anyway. So that left a vacuum where the public were obviously going to speculate and were then berated with "fuck off till Easter" messages.
The Mother's Day update was exactly what people had been expecting and a very nice gesture had it been genuine. God only knows what went into the PR team's heads to post a heavily doctored photo with multiple visible signs of Photoshop. It's almost like they're trolling the press and are taking the piss out of their supporters as well (the die hard boomer Royalists) who were hoping to see a sentimental update of the kids. Along the lines of "Here's the fake picture you've all been braying for now take it and fuck off".
For all the people saying it could be Google Pixel AI editing, that photo was 100% not taken using a mobile phone. The DM published a super-closeup of Charlotte's hand and it was clear enough see a scratch on her knuckle. The original image was taken with a top of the range camera at maximum resolution, and the colour grading matches that of Kate's other photographs with slightly muted tones. So the image was definitely edited from RAW format in Photoshop. The other mistakes people pointed out are typical of the clone brush, liquify and possibly layer visibility mistakes in Photoshop.
Though in terms of AI, all media outlets all possess AI tools that can detect photo manipulation. These are extremely sophisticated and recognise pixel patterns or differing DPI textures that are absolutely not discernible to the human eye. If, for instance, a head was copied and pasted from another image and then resized by hand, the resolution of that area will be different on a microscopic level compared the resolution of the surrounding image. Especially because a professional camera was used here. The higher the resolution, the easier it is to detect discrepancies. I suspect news agencies ran the image through an AI image manipulation engine and it revealed a glaring error somewhere.