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Digital Camera World
Digital Camera World
Hillary K. Grigonis

AI could be stealing your photos in more ways than one – as AI is actually really good at removing complex watermarks

Google Gemini Reddit
A smartphone showing Google Gemini 2.0.

Generative AI’s use of copyrighted images as training data has been part of a number of debates and legal action, but the technology could also be used to steal images in the more traditional sense: by removing the watermark. After Google expanded access to Gemini 2.0 Flash, several users have pointed out that the AI can easily remove watermarks from a photo with a quick text prompt.

As first spotted by Tech Crunch, several users on Reddit have pointed out how easy it is to remove watermarks with Google Gemini 2.0 Flash, while models from Claude and OpenAI have guardrails in place so that the bots refuse requests to remove watermarks. While Gemini 2.0 Flash is still in experimental stages, it’s available free inside of Google AI Studio.

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