this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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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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[–] Etterra@discuss.online 6 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Put all these creepy bastards on a publicly viewable list.

[–] cley_faye@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago

Didn't they already do that in their public posts or whatever? They don't care.

[–] anon_8675309@lemmy.world 3 points 4 hours ago

People are so fucking sick.

[–] Willoughby@piefed.world 23 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] HereIAm@lemmy.world 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Krauerking@lemy.lol 4 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] HereIAm@lemmy.world 3 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Krauerking@lemy.lol 2 points 2 hours ago

I like trying to simplify stuff to basic language and I am happy it was helpful

[–] Zink@programming.dev 3 points 4 hours ago

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.

[–] msage@programming.dev 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

What does focal length means?

[–] tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 4 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] msage@programming.dev 2 points 4 hours ago

Wow, what an amazing reply, thank you very much. Those images help a lot.

[–] LiveLM@lemmy.zip 24 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 1 points 10 hours ago

Some liberal on BlueSky tried to use genAI to unmask ICE agents.

[–] aeration1217@lemmy.org 13 points 19 hours ago

Sounds about right for x users

[–] Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 49 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 14 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

Also a slaver and child abductor.

[–] SaraTonin@lemmy.world 4 points 9 hours ago

And, it seems, murderer

[–] Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 4 points 11 hours ago

Oh right, my bad 😐

[–] ToTheGraveMyLove@sh.itjust.works 93 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (14 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.

[–] mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 23 hours 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.

[–] usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca 47 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (6 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

[–] floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

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[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 19 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Schadrach 0 points 4 hours 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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[–] Paranoidfactoid@lemmy.world 55 points 1 day ago (18 children)

How do these AI models generate nude imagery of children without having been trained with data containing illegal images of nude children?

[–] AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 56 points 1 day ago

The datasets they are trained on do in fact include CSAM. These datasets are so huge that it easily slips through the cracks. It's usually removed whenever it's found, but I don't know how this actually affects the AI models that have already been trained on that data — to my knowledge, it's not possible to selectively "untrain" models, and they would need to be retrained from scratch. Plus I occasionally see it crop up in the news about how new CSAM keeps being found in the training data.

It's one of the many, many problems with generative AI

[–] RedGreenBlue@lemmy.zip 14 points 1 day ago

Can't ask them to sort that out. Are you anti-ai? That's a crime! /s

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[–] pkjqpg1h@lemmy.zip 171 points 1 day ago (7 children)

unblur the face with 1000% accuracy

They have no idea how this models work :D

[–] pkjqpg1h@lemmy.zip 227 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 109 points 1 day ago (1 children)

biblically accurate cw casting

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[–] TheBat@lemmy.world 32 points 1 day ago

Barrett O'Brien

[–] criss_cross@lemmy.world 25 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It’s the same energy as “don’t hallucinate and just say if you don’t know the answer”

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[–] annoyed_onion@lemmy.world 55 points 1 day ago

Though it is 2026. Who's to say Elon didn't feed the unredacted files into grok while out of his face on ket 🙃

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 36 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (6 children)

It feels like being back on the playground

"nuh uh, my laser is 1000% more powerful"

"oh yea, mine is ~~googleplex~~ googolplex percent more powerful"

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