Artificial intelligence has opened up a whole new way to steal pictures online

In June, Google told stock photography website Shutterstock that its researchers had found a weakness that could destroy the site's entire business. Google's researchers had built an AI-powered tool that could easily remove the watermarks Shutterstock uses to protect all of its images across the site. If a company less "not evil" had done so, it could theoretically clone and steal Shutterstock's entire database of images. Google's exploit, which it later posted on its research blog, analyzed hundreds of pictures with consistent watermarks, like Shutterstock's. Once the algorithm learned to look at a photo and decide which pixel was a watermark and which wasn't, it could just remove all the watermark pixels.