i wouldn't have any confidence in being able to remove a 0.5 bit watermark (presence/absence). what you see is probably a functional decoy.
Of course if you need to regenerate the image with an unwatermarked image-generation model to remove it, it more or less still serves its purpose.
I would layer two watermarks and let the public remove the most visible one.
Similar to your printer fingerprinting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots