Tanay Jaipuria, tech analyst and partner at Wing VC revealed that Gemini AI 2.0 Flash AI users had discovered its ability to clear watermarks. The experimental version of Gemini also allows ‘conversational image editing’ when generating pictures from text prompts.
Several X and Reddit users noted that Gemini AI 2.0 Flash will remove watermarks and attempt to fill in any gaps created by deleted watermarks. Jaipuria said Gemini 2.0 Flash, available in Google’s AI studio, was amazing at removing watermarks from images (and putting its own subtle watermark in instead).
However, Debarghya Das, a former founding team member at Google Search and current VC at Menlo Ventures, disclosed that some people were upset because ‘this breaks copyright for artists’. He added that the only reason copyrights were the way they were was that tech could easily remove other variants. Das also speculated that Google will likely remove this feature in the coming weeks because edited image results were not ‘high-res’.
Gemini AI 2.0 removes watermarks from images with simple text commands
TechCrunch reports revealed that the Gemini AI 2.0 Flash AI model was now equipped with native image generation that can produce pictures from a text prompt and remove watermarks with high accuracy.
A research team at Google built a watermark removal algorithm in 2017 to highlight the need for more secure protections. Although some AI tools, like OpenAI’s GPT-4o, will refuse requests to remove them, tools like Watermark Remover.io can already scrub watermarks from companies like Shutterstock.
However, according to TechCrunch, Gemini AI 2.0 Flash is reportedly better than other options at removing complex watermarks like Getty Images stamps and filling in the image. After removing the watermark, it adds a SynthID mark, effectively replacing a copyright mark with one edited with AI.
“Problem is, it changes the whole image unnecessarily. There are better AIs for removing watermarks and they will also remove the annoying Gemini watermark as well.”
– Redditor
Users also noted that Gemini AI 2.0 Flash could apparently add recognizable images of real people to photos, a feature that the full Gemini model does not support. Flash’s latest image features are only available for developers through AI Studio, so its obvious lack of guardrails makes it not quite open for everyone to use (or abuse).
Google calls on developers to experiment with new Gemini AI features
On March 12th, Google announced that it was making Gemini AI 2.0 Flash available for developer experimentation across all regions currently supported by Google AI Studio. Google added that users could now test the new capability using an experimental version of Gemini 2.0 Flash in Google AI Studio and via the Gemini API.
According to Google, Gemini 2.0 Flash helps users edit images through many turns of a natural language dialogue, which is great for iterating towards a perfect image or exploring different ideas together. Google acknowledged that 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.
TechCrunch noted that Gemini 2.0 Flash was not a perfect watermark remover, and it appeared to struggle with certain semi-transparent watermarks and watermarks that canvassed large portions of images. Some copyright holders will also surely take issue with Gemini 2.0 Flash’s lack of usage restrictions. 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.
Google is yet to make an official statement addressing Gemini’s newly discovered watermark removal capability.
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