Google has announced that users will soon be able to remove visible watermarks from content generated by the company's AI models, including images, videos, and songs. However, this change will not affect the invisible SynthID watermark and metadata associated with the C2PA standard.
Josh Woodward, Vice President of Google’s Gemini division, said in a post on the social network X that this feature will be available for the Nano Banana, Omni, and Lyria models. According to him, users will be able to disable the display of visible watermarks through Gemini settings and the Flow video editor, and support for this feature in Search will be provided soon.
This change reflects Google's new approach to labeling AI-generated content. Visible watermarks can in some cases make using this content in professional and creative projects more difficult, but the need to identify AI-generated content remains.
According to ITNA, Woodward explained that Google is trying to strike a balance between users' creative control and safety requirements. Accordingly, although visible watermarks will be optional, the invisible SynthID watermark and C2PA metadata will remain in place to increase transparency. As a result, users will still be able to use Gemini or Search to check whether an image was generated by AI.
This feature will roll out in the coming days, and after activation, users will be able to enable or disable the display of visible watermarks via Settings > Media watermark.
According to TechCrunch, Google also said it is open-sourcing a new library called Credentio. This library allows developers to implement a local verification mechanism in their apps.
This move follows the controversial decision by Anthropic to add watermarks to text and files generated by Claude in order to comply with European Union regulations.