People are using Google’s new AI model to remove watermarks from images

From the article: Users on social media have discovered a controversial use case for Google’s new Gemini AI model: removing watermarks from images, including from images published by Getty Images and other well-known stock media outfits.

Last week, Google expanded access to its Gemini 2.0 Flash model’s image generation feature, which lets the model natively generate and edit image content. It’s a powerful capability, by all accounts. But it also appears to have few guardrails. Gemini 2.0 Flash will uncomplainingly create images depicting celebrities and copyrighted characters, and — as alluded to earlier — remove watermarks from existing photos.

As several X and Reddit users noted, Gemini 2.0 Flash won’t just remove watermarks, but will also attempt to fill in any gaps created by a watermark’s deletion. Other AI-powered tools do this, too, but Gemini 2.0 Flash seems to be exceptionally skilled at it — and free to use.

To be clear, Gemini 2.0 Flash’s image generation feature is labeled as “experimental” and “not for production use” at the moment, and is only available in Google’s developer-facing tools like AI Studio. The model also isn’t a perfect watermark remover. Gemini 2.0 Flash appears to struggle with certain semi-transparent watermarks and watermarks that canvas large portions of images.

Still, some copyright holders will surely take issue with Gemini 2.0 Flash’s lack of usage restrictions. Some models, including Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet and OpenAI’s GPT-4o, explicitly refuse to remove watermarks; Claude calls removing a watermark from an image “unethical and potentially illegal.”

Removing a watermark without the original owner’s consent is considered illegal under U.S. copyright law (according to law firms like this one) outside of rare exceptions.

Nothing can surprise me anymore. It’s a tool and just like any tool, you can use it for good or for bad things. Although, I’d argue that there aren’t that many things AI is good for yet

Fitting that the technology developed by stealing other people’s work is now being used to steal other people’s work.

I thought google released a paper at least a few years ago with a vision model that did this? Am I misremembering?

As an artist (one of them – digital artist) this is so discouraging to read.