Artists Furious as Google AI Wipes Out Watermarks Easily

March 17, 2025

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Artists Furious as Google AI Wipes Out Watermarks Easily

Social media users have just discovered what appears to be a highly controversial application of Google’s new Gemini AI model: removing watermarks from images, including photos featured in Getty Images and other major stock media sources.

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Last week, Google broadened the use of image generation capability in its Gemini 2.0 Flash model, with which the model can natively generate and edit an image.

This is a very powerful feature, by all indications, but it appears also to have very few guardrails. Gemini 2.0 Flash will uncomplainingly create images depicting celebrities and copyrighted characters – and, as already alluded to, remove watermarks from existing photos.

Skill grades up: Model Gemini 2 Flash quite awesome in removing watermarks from images! pic.twitter.com/6QIk0FlfCv

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As several observers on X and Reddit have highlighted, Gemini 2.0 Flash also intends to fill the blanks and not just remove the watermark. The technology has been replicated by other AI-assisted appliances, but Gemini 2.0 Flash appears to have exceptional genius talent for such a task and is completely free.

Gemini 2.0 Flash-Edit all your images easy through simple text inputs in Google’s AI Studio.

As far as it goes, at the moment, Google has deemed Gemini 2.0 Flash’s image generation function “experimental” and “not for production use”. Currently, it’s available strictly in Google’s developer-facing tools, such as AI Studio.

That said, it also does not automatically make it a perfect watermark remover. Getty Images-claiming parts of images as watermarks by Gemini 2.0 Flash are typically easy, but it also does not seem to deal well on certain semi-transparent general watermarks and watermarks covering a large part of the images.

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At the same time, some copyright holders will definitely not be pleased about the lack of usage restrictions over Gemini 2.0 Flash. Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet and OpenAI’s GPT-4o deny watermark removal by design: Claude, for example, denounces the action as “unethical, potentially illegal”.

Removing an owner’s watermark without permission is considered a violation of U.S. copyright law. This is a law that applies generally with only a few exceptions as quoted in law offices like this one.

Google did not reply to an outside-of-business-hours request for comment.

Source https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/16/people-are-using-googles-new-ai-model-to-remove-watermarks-from-images/