Digital watermarks are often embedded invisibly in images to assert ownership, and paintings are no exception. A new preprint on arXiv shows that such marks can be removed by a surprisingly straightforward method: re-rendering the image as a series of brush strokes.
The attack, called BrushOff, uses a pretrained stroke-based model to redraw the watermarked painting. According to the abstract, this simple redrawing process was enough to defeat the most robust watermark the authors tested. The paper does not yet provide full details of the implementation or the watermarking schemes evaluated.
Because this is a single preprint, there is no independent comparison to other attacks or defenses. Still, the result suggests that ownership marks on digital art may be fragile against even basic re-rendering techniques, a concern for artists and platforms that rely on invisible watermarks.