Is there an AI-proof watermark?

No, and the reason is structural. A visible watermark has to be visible, which means a model can locate it as easily as you can, and generative inpainting will fill the area back in with pixels that look right.

Removal does not recover your photograph. It invents a plausible replacement for the covered region out of the pixels around it, which is a much easier job than reconstruction because nobody is checking the result against an original. It only has to look unbroken. Free sites do it in one upload, and general-purpose editors do it as a side effect of ordinary object removal.

What "AI-resistant" designs actually buy you

Watermarks sold as AI-resistant or AI-proof are real products, and the design advice behind them is sensible as far as it goes: put the mark across the subject instead of the corner, vary the opacity, use irregular edges and fine texture so it tangles with the photo's own grain. That raises the effort required. It does not make removal impossible, and none of the AI-proof claims come with published independent testing — the evidence on offer is the seller's own.

There is a cost on the other side, too. A mark heavy enough to be genuinely awkward to remove is heavy enough to spoil the preview you wanted a client to look at. And a visible mark is easily copied the other way: lifted off your image and pasted onto someone else's.

An invisible mark is not the fix either

It fails differently. Research on removal attacks has repeatedly shown that pushing an image through a diffusion model — regenerating it, or simply editing it — drives detection of several state-of-the-art invisible watermarks down towards chance. The 2024 Erasing the Invisible challenge was built to stress-test precisely this. A mark you cannot see is easier to destroy by accident, not harder.

What holds up

Provenance, and the record you kept. Hold on to the original file with its metadata and content credentials intact, check what your exported file actually carries before it goes out, and register the work where your jurisdiction offers registration. That moves the argument off whether someone can scrub your logo — they can — and onto whether you can show the file came from you. If it is generated images you are worried about rather than your own photographs, how AI watermarks work covers what those marks can and cannot tell you.