The first time the idea of doing this occurred to me, I'd had a (very brief) exchange with @vividvivka.bsky.social as she was lamenting how someone dumped a bunch of her content onto the interwebs.
But ... it could be marked so the thief can be found, I thought.
It's not simple but yes it can.
Semi-Interesting Photography, etc.
My gallery app places a DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform) watermark on displayed images.
I spent the past couple days with "Claude" refining the detection process. Here is an image screenshotted from the gallery including a big streak of gray background, detected perfectly.
It's working very well!