- Google Gemin 2.0 Flash’s image generator in AI Studio can remove watermarks from images
- It seems to lack the guardrails found in the full Gemini app
- Gemini 2.0 Flash in AI Studio can also generate images of celebrities
Google Gemini 2.0 Flash’s new image generation capabilities enable it to remove watermarks from images so well that it could enable large scale copyright violation and that’s very concerning for all of us.
Lots of users on the X platform have posted examples of how they’ve been able to use the AI tool to easily remove watermarks.
New skill unlocked: Gemini 2 Flash model is really awesome at removing watermarks in images! pic.twitter.com/6QIk0FlfCvMarch 15, 2025
Digital watermarks on images enable digital creators to show a preview of their work before somebody decides to purchase it, at which point the watermarks are removed. AI tools that remove watermarks on images for free are nothing new but are deeply unethical, and can land you in legal hot water if you use the stolen images they create in any way.
Other users on X have noted that Gemini 2.0 Flash accessed via AI Studio can add celebrities into images, although in testing I found the results seem a little bit random, with Gemini often refusing the request.
left: my deskright: elon musk sitting at my deskI usually tend to think worries re:photoshop etc are overblown, but goddam, the internet is about to get a lot weirder pic.twitter.com/O9gXBaWgkYMarch 14, 2025
The power of AI Studio
Google recently released a new version of its Gemini 2.0 Flash AI model that can generate its own images. This sounds slightly confusing when you realize that we’ve all been able to go to gemini.google.com or fire up the Gemini app and ask it to create an AI image for well over a year now.
However, what the mobile app and browser-based versions of Gemini do is call upon Imagen 3, Google’s flagship AI image generator, to generate the image for them. Imagen 3 will not remove watermarks from images if asked.
Recently Google has enabled Gemini 2.0 Flash to create and modify images itself. You can’t access the image generation power of Google 2.0 Flash from the regular Gemini interface, instead you need to access it via Google’s AI Studio, a developer-focussed interface for interacting with its latest AI models.
Cause for concern
AI Studio is free to access and just requires a normal Google account for registration. To test it out I uploaded a watermarked image and was able to easily remove the watermark.
The results weren’t perfect – the image became slightly degraded and it added its own Gemini star logo to the bottom left corner, but what is especially concerning with the new Gemini 2.0 Flash watermark removal ability is how well it does it.
It’s clearly not the purpose that Gemini 2.0 Flash was created for, but the fact that Google hasn’t put sufficient guardrails in place with its image generator is a concerning development and something that needs addressing urgently.
TechRadar has reached out to Google for comment on this issue and will update this story when we hear back.
