Customers on social media have found a controversial use case for Google’s new Gemini AI mannequin: eradicating watermarks from photos, together with from photos revealed by Getty Photographs and different well-known inventory media outfits.
Final week, Google expanded entry to its Gemini 2.0 Flash mannequin’s picture era characteristic, which lets the mannequin natively generate and edit picture content material. It’s a powerful capability, by all accounts. However it additionally seems to have few guardrails. Gemini 2.0 Flash will uncomplainingly create photos depicting celebrities and copyrighted characters, and — as alluded to earlier — take away watermarks from current photographs.
New talent unlocked: Gemini 2 Flash mannequin is absolutely superior at eradicating watermarks in photos! pic.twitter.com/6QIk0FlfCv
— Deedy (@deedydas) March 15, 2025
As a number of X and Reddit customers famous, Gemini 2.0 Flash gained’t simply take away watermarks, however try and fill in any gaps created by a watermark’s deletion. Different AI-powered instruments do that, too, however Gemini 2.0 Flash appears to be exceptionally expert at it — and free to make use of.
Gemini 2.0 Flash, accessible in Google’s AI studio, is superb at enhancing photos with easy textual content prompts.
It can also take away watermarks from photos (and places its personal delicate watermark in as a substitute 🤣) pic.twitter.com/ZnHTQJsT1Z
— Tanay Jaipuria (@tanayj) March 16, 2025
To be clear, Gemini 2.0 Flash’s picture era characteristic is labeled as “experimental” and “not for manufacturing use” in the meanwhile, and is just accessible in Google’s developer-facing instruments like AI Studio. The mannequin additionally isn’t an ideal watermark remover. Gemini 2.0 Flash seems to battle with sure semi-transparent watermarks and watermarks that canvas giant parts of photos.
Nonetheless, some copyright holders will certainly take difficulty with Gemini 2.0 Flash’s lack of utilization restrictions. Fashions together with Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet and OpenAI’s GPT-4o explicitly refuse to take away watermarks; Claude calls eradicating a watermark from a picture “unethical and doubtlessly unlawful.”
Eradicating a watermark with out the unique proprietor’s consent is taken into account unlawful underneath U.S. copyright regulation (based on law firms like this one) outside of rare exceptions.
Google didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark despatched exterior of regular enterprise hours.
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