this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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379
Epstein Files: X Users Are Asking Grok to 'Unblur' Photos of Children (www.bellingcat.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by Beep@lemmus.org 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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[–] ToTheGraveMyLove@sh.itjust.works 101 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (22 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.

[–] Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks 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.

[–] KyuubiNoKitsune@lemmy.blahaj.zone 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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

[–] unmagical@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] KyuubiNoKitsune@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 2 weeks ago

I didn't realise that they released the images as pdfs too.

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