Tools like Watermark Remover.io can already scrub marks from companies like Shutterstock, and a research team at Google built a watermark removal algorithm in 2017 to highlight the need for more secure protections. Conversely, some AI tools — like OpenAI’s GPT-4o — will refuse requests to remove them.

Tanay Jaipuria, tech analyst and partner at Wing VC, is one of the many Gemini AI 2.0 Flash AI users who have discovered its ability to clear watermarks. The experimental version of Gemini also allows ‘conversational image editing’ when generating pictures from text prompts.

It's bad enough that tech companies trained their AI models on content that doesn't belong to them. Now, however, it appears that at least one AI model is being used to remove watermarks from images so others can use content that doesn't belong to them,