this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
DID YOU JUST DOWNLOAD A VIRUS ON MY KEYBOARD?
No regrets! runs away with all of your data in a comically large sack
Actually, there is a short video on that page that explains this with examples