Stock Photo Companies Randomize Their Watermarks to Foil Google's Thieving Algorithm

Last month at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference, Google showed off an algorithm capable removing watermarks from photos. Using neural networks, researchers in the company's artificial intelligence lab could train an algorithm to identify recurring visual patterns in a watermark (the sans-serif type in Shutterstock's logo, or the dense logomark of Adobe Stock, for instance) and automatically strip them from an image. To anyone who produces or sells stock photography, this was troubling news--watermarks have since the early 1990s provided the first line of defense against the theft of unlicensed photos. Granted, anyone with serious Photoshop skills can eliminate a watermark in about an hour. Google didn't set out to undermine stock photo companies.