In the days after the US Department of Justice (DOJ) published 3.5 million pages of documents related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, multiple users on X have asked Grok to “unblur” or remove the black boxes covering the faces of children and women in images that were meant to protect their privacy.
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late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein
I’m so done with all the whitewashing. “Sex offender” sounds like I behaved wrong in consensual sex. What this prick was is a pedophile. A child rapist. A kid-abuser and -rapist. But surely no “late financier” or whatever else media chose over the facts.
Also a slaver and child abductor.
And, it seems, murderer
Oh right, my bad 😐
Some liberal on BlueSky tried to use genAI to unmask ICE agents.
Won’t work and if it does work, the resulting image has little to nothing to do with the original.
Source: I opened a badly taken .raw file a few thousand times and I know what focal length means, come at me.
Do you have a good way to remember which way fast and slow f. stops go? I always have to trail and error when adjusting camera settings to go the right direction or especially listening to someone talk about aperture.
Wider open you let in more light, and want faster shutter speed, more closed you get less light and want a longer shutter speed.
And f stops work backwards. Think of it as percent of sensor covered. The bigger the number the more covered it is and the smaller the hole/aperture.
So Wide open = low coverage = small f stop -> lots of light -> “fast” shutter speed. And then the other way around. I think you finally worded it in a way it can stick in my brain! I like thinking about the f value as how much you’re covering the lens.
To add more specifics here for you, note that the f-stop is usually shown as a fraction, like f/2.8, f/4.0, etc.
So first of all, since the number is on the bottom of the fraction, there’s where you get smaller numbers = more light.
It’s also shown as a fraction because it’s a ratio, between your lens’s focal length (not focal distance to the subject) and the diameter of the aperture.
So if I’m taking a telephoto shot with my 70-200 @ 200 with the aperture wide open at f/2.8, that means the aperture should appear as 200/2.8 = 71.4mm. And that seems right to me! If you’re the subject looking into the lens the opening looks huge.
I like trying to simplify stuff to basic language and I am happy it was helpful
What does focal length means?
It’s the distance from the lens to the focal point, as in where the picture focuses on the sensor behind the lens. If you have a very long focal length like a telescope, you can see things further away but the range you can see is very small. With a short focal length you can’t see as far but you can see a much wider view. Check out this chart:
If you get very close to something with a short focal length or far away from it with a long focal length you can get essentially the same picture of a main subject (although what you can see in the background will be different), but even then a short lens will sort of taper your subject closer to a single point and a long lens will widen it. You can see this effect easily on faces: see this gif or this gif or this picture for an example.
Wow, what an amazing reply, thank you very much. Those images help a lot.
And gruk, being trained on elons web history, doesn’t need to be asked to find, let alone unblur said images.
Are these people fucking stupid? AI can’t remove something hardcoded to the image. The only way for it to “remove” it is by placing a different image over it, but since it has no idea what’s underneath, it would literally just be making up a new image that has nothing to do with the content of the original. Jfc, people are morons. I’m disappointed the article doesn’t explicitly state that either.
Hey! Cut it out! If those people could read, they’d be very upset!
Actually, there is a short video on that page that explains this with examples
There was someone who reported that due to the incompetence of whitehouse staffers, some of the Epstein files had simply been “redacted” in ms word by highlighting the text black, so people were actually able to remove the redactions by turning the pdf back into word and removing the black highlighting to reveal the text.
Who knows if some of the photos might be the same issue.
It was simpler than that. You can just copy the black highlighter text and paste it anywhere.
“Hackers used advanced hacking to unredact the Epstein files!” - Actual headline. The “hackers” did just Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, opens word processor, Ctrl+V
Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, opens word processor, Ctrl+V
DID YOU JUST DOWNLOAD A VIRUS ON MY KEYBOARD?
No regrets! runs away with all of your data in a comically large sack
That’s, not how images like png or jpgs work.
In the case of what wound up on Roman Numeral Ten (formerly twitter) that’s correct, but given the actual PDF dump from the gov, if they just slapped an annotation on top of the image it’ll be possible to remove it and reveal what’s underneath.
I didn’t realise that they released the images as pdfs too.
The black boxes would be impossible, but there are some types of blur that keep enough of the original data they can be undone. There was a pedofile that used a swirl to cover his face in pictures and investigators were able to unswirl the images and identify him.
With how the rest of it has gone it wouldn’t surprise me if someone was incompetent enough to use a reversible one, although I have doubts Grok would do it properly.
Edit: this technique only works for video, but maybe if there are several pictures of the same person all blurred it could be used there too?
Several years ago, authorities were searching the world for a guy who had been going around the world, molesting children, photographing them, and distributing them on the Internet. He was often in the photos, but he had chosen to use some sort of swirl blur on his face to hide it. The authorities just “unswirled” it, and there was his face, in all those photos of abused children.
They caught him soon after.
They couldn’t do that from one photo though, they’d need several examples all believed to be the same guy. A swirl like that preserves some of the information and you can reverse it, but the lost data is lost. Do that for several photos and you can get enough preserved bits to piece something together.
Same idea for some other kinds of blurs or mosaics. Black boxes, not so much - you e got no data to work with, so anything you tried to reconstruct would be more or less entirely fantasy.
Yeah, but this type of machine learning and diffusion models used in image genAI are almost completely disjoint
Agree with you there. Just pointing out that in theory and with the right technique, some blurring methods can be undone. Grok most certainly is the wrong tool for the job.
This is true that some blurs could be undone, but the ones used in the files are definitely destructive and cannot be undone. Grok and any other image generation tool is also definitely not capable of doing it. It requires knowledge of how it was blurred so you can use the same algorithm to undo it, models simply guess what it should look like.
A swirl is a distortion that is non-destructive. Am anonymity blur averages out pixels over a wide area in a repetitive manner, which destroys information. Would it be possible to reverse? Maybe a little bit. Maybe one pixel out of every %, but there wouldn’t be any way to prove the accuracy of that pixel and there would be massive gaps in information.
Swirl is destfuctive like almost everything in raster graphics with recompressing, but unswirling it back makes a good approximation in somehow reduced quality. If the program or a code of effect is known, e.g. they did it in Photoshop, you just drag a slider to the opposite side. Coming to think of it, it could be a nice puzzle in an adventure game or one another kind of captcha.
You’re right. I meant more by “non-destructive” that it is, depending on factors like intensity and known algorithm, reversible.
They think that the AI is smart enough to deduce from the pixels around it what the original face must have looked like, even though there’s actually no reason why there should be a strict causal relationship between those things.
Of course they are. Who’s left on Twitter nowadays? Elon acolytes?
When I realized that tweets from paid account’s always stuck at top, Really?? I immediatily stopped using it.
I am so glad I no longer interact with that dumpster fire of a social network. It’s like the Elon takeover and the monetization program brought out every weirdo in the world out of the woodwork
Sounds about right for x users
Put all these creepy bastards on a publicly viewable list.
Didn’t they already do that in their public posts or whatever? They don’t care.
Maybe, but I never said anyone should reveal their identities and places of residence to the public. In fact consider should do that because that would be illegal.
unblur the face with 1000% accuracy
They have no idea how this models work :D
biblically accurate cw casting
CW? The TV show?
Barrett O’Brien
Though it is 2026. Who’s to say Elon didn’t feed the unredacted files into grok while out of his face on ket 🙃
It’s the same energy as “don’t hallucinate and just say if you don’t know the answer”
and don’t forget “make no mistakes” :D
Enhance!
Uncrop!
Or percentages
It feels like being back on the playground
“nuh uh, my laser is 1000% more powerful”
“oh yea, mine is
googleplexgoogolplex percent more powerful”Wait, what? My son has been using “googleplex” when he wants a really big number. I thought it was a weird word he made up. I guess it’s a thing…
It is, with a slight different spelling. A googol is 10^100, a googolplex is a 10^(googol) or written conventionally, a one followed by a metric shit ton of zeros.
I wondered if the word had something to do with a googol (I learned that word from World Book Encyclopedia kids books), but I figured my young son didn’t know that word yet and just invented some word using Google. Crazy how language can get around on the playground.
Fun fact, Google was supposed to be named Googol, but the guy who were tasked with ordering the domain name misunderstood. As history would tell, they just decided to stick with Google.
My son also uses it frequently, he learnt that word from a Captain Underpants book or one of the other works from dav pilkey so maybe its from there
So my company was involved with a lawsuit that I was asked to help review files and redact information. They used a specific software that all the files were loaded into and the software performed the redactions and saved the redacted files. It really is mind blowing the government wouldn’t use a similar process.
These are the clowns that redacted the first files with MS black highlight, because DOGE cut their Adobe accounts.
“Bellingcat” paid for ‘damage-control’ ?
People are so fucking sick.
I doubt any of these people are accessing X over Tor. Their accounts and IPs are known.
In a sane world, they’d be prosecuted.
In MAGAMERICA, they are protected by the Spirit of EpsteinWhat crime do you imagine they would be committing?
I don’t know what they hope to gain by seeing the kid’s face, unless they think they can match it up with an Epstein family member or something (seems unlikely to be their goal).
