Earlier, we shared Google’s newly launched Google Gemini 2.0 Flash modelWith powerful image editing features, no Photoshop needed—you can easily replace backgrounds, specific objects, and more in your original images. But it doesn’t stop there: recently, netizens have discovered that Google Gemini 2.0 Flash can also remove watermarks from images, nearly perfectly eliminating watermarks from some well-known paid stock photo websites.
Does Google Gemini 2.0 Flash have the ability to remove image watermarks? In reality, it redraws the entire image.
A few days ago, Reddit user xXLeoXxOne shared the results of his hands-on test of Gemini’s watermark removal. He said Gemini performed quite well at removing watermarks, and attached three test images from professional photographer Nate Zeman, Shutterstock, and iStock by Getty Images. The model used was Google’s latest Gemini 2.0 Flash, which comes with image editing capabilities.
Gemini is pretty good in removing watermarks
byu/xXLeoXxOne insingularity
Now that everyone can use Google Gemini 2.0 Flash for free on Google Studio AI, if watermark removal really works as shown in what xXLeoXxOne shared, it would undoubtedly be a major threat to creators and stock image websites.
Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that Google Gemini 2.0 Flash doesn’t just process the watermark area locally—it redraws the entire image. The resulting image has many subtle differences from the original, like with the last iStock deer image, where not only did the color tone change, but the deer itself looks computer-generated.
Nate Zeman himself also responded on the X social platform about his work being stripped of its watermark: “This still looks terrible, Diddy. I can even see traces of your attempt to remove the watermark.”
This still looks like shit diddy, I can see parts of the watermarks on your attempt at removing them. https://t.co/FnuSaMbr3g
— Nate Zeman (@natezemanphoto) March 16, 2025
I also tried using Google Gemini 2.0 Flash to remove the watermark. Unfortunately, it didn’t work—after redrawing, the watermark was still there, and the Chinese characters turned into unreadable text. From this, it’s clear that Chinese text is out of the question for now; the results are very poor. Some netizens also reported that Gemini responded: “Unfortunately, I am unable to directly edit images.”
Another thing to note is that removing a watermark does not change the fact that the image may still be protected by copyright law. Therefore, even if you remove it perfectly, you still cannot use these images for commercial purposes. If you get caught, you will face various legal risks such as copyright infringement and DMCA takedown complaints.
In theory, AI models like this should have copyright protection policies in place and shouldn’t allow users to remove watermarks from images. It’s possible that this is because Gemini 2.0 Flash’s image generation feature is still experimental, and there’s a high chance it will be changed in the future.
However, Gemini 2.0 Flash can already achieve this effect at the current stage, and when more powerful new multimodal open-source models come out in the future, they might be able to do it too. How creators in the AI era can protect the copyright of their works is truly a major challenge.
Source: KOCPC Chinese