In a move that will surely make discerning AI content even easier, Google is now letting users turn off the visible watermarks on images, videos, and music generated by its AI tools. The new 'Media watermark' setting in Gemini and Google's AI video generator, Flow, allows you to disable the 'sparkle' watermark that has been adorning the bottom-right corner of content produced by the company's Nano Banana and Omni models.

But fear not, watermark-removal enthusiasts: Google isn't completely abandoning accountability. Josh Woodward, the vice president of Google Labs, Gemini, and AI Studio, assures us that invisible SynthID watermarks and C2PA metadata will still be embedded in the background. So you can still verify if something is AI-generated - just by asking Gemini or Search, which is as convenient as asking a friend to check your homework.

While this change might make it slightly harder to spot AI-generated content at a glance, let's be real: many users were already editing out those watermarks anyway. Google is just formalizing what was already happening. Other AI image generators, like OpenAI's and Meta's, have long eschewed visible watermarks, relying instead on SynthID and C2PA, while Meta introduced its own Content Seal standard. Anthropic, not to be left out, announced this week that it's applying invisible watermarks to both AI-generated text and images.

Google plans to roll out this watermark setting to Search as well, though the toggle won't launch in countries that require visible watermarks. So, if you're in one of those places, you'll just have to keep your sparkles.