Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash model has been found capable of removing watermarks from copyrighted material and depicting copyrighted characters in its generated images.

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.

Google’s new Gemini Flash 2.0 image generation tool is capable of removing watermarks from copyrighted images, users on social media have found. The model is currently in its “experimental” phase, and only available to developers.