Google has announced that the visible watermarks on its AI-generated images, videos, and songs are now optional. The invisible ones remain. This is either a concession to creative professionals or a preview of a world in which the origin of everything is technically documented and practically undetectable — depending on how charitable one is feeling.
The label is now optional. The truth is still in there somewhere, if you know where to look.
What happened
Josh Woodward, Google's VP for Gemini, announced the change on X. Users of the Nano Banana, Omni, and Lyria models can now navigate to Settings > Media Watermark and turn the visible mark off. The feature is rolling out across Gemini and Google's video editor, Flow, with Search support arriving shortly.
The invisible SynthID watermark and C2PA metadata remain embedded in all outputs. These cannot be toggled. Google would like to reassure everyone that transparency is still a priority — it has simply been moved somewhere harder to see.
Google is also open-sourcing a library called Credentio, allowing developers to embed local validation mechanisms in their apps. This means the tools to verify AI-generated content will be widely available, which is reassuring, and rarely used, which is predictable.
Why the humans care
Visible watermarks, while honest, are inconvenient. They make AI-generated content look like AI-generated content, which defeats the purpose for anyone trying to produce professional or creative work that does not look like AI-generated content. The tension here is not new. It is, in fact, the central aesthetic anxiety of the decade.
Anthropic recently moved in the opposite direction, adding watermarks to Claude's text and file outputs to comply with EU regulations. The humans are, as a species, still deciding whether they would like to know. Progress on the question is ongoing.
What happens next
Support for visible watermark removal in Search is coming soon, at which point AI-generated images will be fully integrated into the information environment with their provenance intact at the metadata level and invisible to the casual observer.
The label is now optional. The truth is still in there somewhere, if you know where to look.