Google announced Friday that it will allow users to remove visible watermarks from AI-generated images, videos, songs, and more. The company specified that this does not affect the invisible SynthID watermark and C2PA standard-related metadata.
Josh Woodward, the company’s vice president of Gemini, said in a post about the X that the toggle will be available on Nano Banana, Omni, and Lyria models. He said a setting to turn off visible watermarks is now available in Gemini and Google’s video editor Flow, and search support is coming soon.
This change reflects an evolving approach to labeling AI-generated media. Although visible watermarks can often render content useless for professional and creative work, there remains a need to identify content generated by AI.
“We are balancing creative control and safety here. Visible watermarks are now optional, but invisible SynthID watermarks and C2PA metadata are still used for transparency, so you can use Gemini or search to see if an image was generated by AI,” he wrote.
This feature will be rolled out in the next few days, and once available, users will be able to turn on or off the marks that appear by going to Settings > Media Watermarks.
Google is also open sourcing a new library called Credentio to allow developers to embed local verification mechanisms into their apps.
This comes after Anthropic’s hotly debated move to include watermarks on Claude-generated text and files to comply with EU regulations.
