They don’t ‘retain’ a watermark. They ‘reproduce’ the watermark.
It’s entirely possible for a diffusion model to produce an original work and yet still hallucinate a ‘shutterstock’ watermark onto it, in much the same way as GPT can hallucinate valid-looking citations for legal cases that never happened.
That's a completely fair point a few people have made. But I think the idea is, if you are a creator, the AI is doing something that you might call copying if it were a person. If it does that, what is your redress as the creator?
