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Epstein Files: X Users Are Asking Grok to 'Unblur' Photos of Children (www.bellingcat.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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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[–] 96 points 9 months ago* (21 children)

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.

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  • [–] 49 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (8 children)

    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?

    https://youtu.be/acKYYwcxpGk

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  • [–] 19 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 16 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah, but this type of machine learning and diffusion models used in image genAI are almost completely disjoint

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 13 points 9 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 9 months ago* (7 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 15 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    That's, not how images like png or jpgs work.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    It was simpler than that. You can just copy the black highlighter text and paste it anywhere.

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  • [–] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    "Hackers used advanced hacking to unredact the Epstein files!" - Actual headline. The "hackers" did just Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, opens word processor, Ctrl+V

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