Can you use AI to remove watermarks?

Not if the image belongs to someone else and you plan to use it. The AI part is almost beside the point: the tool does not change what you are doing, it just makes it quicker. Cleaning up a stranger’s photo so you can put it on your website is still using something you do not have permission to use.

Start with the basics, because everything else hangs off them. Under section 16 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (the CDPA), copying a work, issuing copies, communicating it to the public or adapting it without a licence infringes copyright. That covers a substantial part of the work too, and the IPO says courts interpret “substantial part” broadly. You cannot dodge the problem by using only a chunk of the picture.

Here is what people get wrong all the time. They look at an image, see no © symbol, and decide it is fair game. It isn’t. The IPO says the symbol does not have to be present for copyright to exist, and that the vast majority of images online are likely to be protected. The only safe routes are specific permission through a licence, or a site whose terms allow your use and which is the copyright owner’s own site.

Then there is the AI angle. The government’s Report on Copyright and AI, published in March 2026, says that if you put a work you did not create into AI photo-editing software, you need permissions to use it, including to make copies. Uploading someone else’s watermarked image into an AI editor is not a neutral step. You can be in trouble before you even get a clean result back.

And that is before the watermark itself comes into it, which is where a second, separate piece of law turns up.

How to do it well

The legitimate routes are easy, and a lot less stressful than gambling on a stranger’s photo.

1. Licence the image. If an image carries a stock library’s watermark, licensing it from that library is the way to get a copy you are allowed to use. The watermark is the shop window; the licence is buying the thing.
2. Use openly licensed images, and follow their terms. Open does not mean free of conditions, so check what the licence asks of you, often a credit, and do it. Or use your own photos.
3. Edit what you have the right to edit. If the photo is yours, or you are licensed to edit it, removing a watermark or logo is fine, and this is where AI tools are perfectly reasonable. An old template logo stuck in the corner of your own picture can go.
4. Ask the owner. A clear written yes gives you something to point to later.
5. Generate an original image instead. Then there is no watermark to remove and no one else’s work involved, as long as the output does not copy an existing image.

If you cannot trace the owner at all, you may be able to apply for an IPO orphan works licence, but only after a diligent search. Diligent is the key word. A quick scroll and a shrug will not do.

Rules and risks

Removing rights information. Section 296ZG of the CDPA deals with electronic rights management information, and this is where removing a watermark can create separate trouble on top of infringement. It applies where a person knowingly and without authority removes or alters electronic rights management information associated with a copy of a copyright work, knowing or having reason to believe that this induces, enables, facilitates or conceals an infringement. It also covers distributing, or communicating to the public, copies with that information stripped out. The copyright owner (and the person issuing or communicating the work) gets the same rights against you as for copyright infringement, so these are civil remedies like an ordinary infringement claim.

Rights management information means information provided by the copyright owner that identifies the work, the author, the copyright owner or holder of rights, or the terms and conditions of use, plus any numbers or codes representing that information. The section is about electronic information, so not every watermark will automatically qualify. A watermark naming the owner or a stock library can carry exactly that sort of information, though, and so can embedded metadata. The IPO says deliberately removing metadata that identifies the copyright owner is unlawful, so scrubbing the hidden data counts as well as the visible stamp.

Infringement. Separately, using or copying the image without a licence can infringe copyright under section 16, whether or not the watermark is gone.

Put the two together and the risk is layered: one edit, two potential problems. Your own images, or ones you have licensed, are fine to edit. Someone else’s, with the watermark removed, are a problem.

This is general information, not legal advice.