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Epstein Files: X Users Are Asking Grok to 'Unblur' Photos of Children
(www.bellingcat.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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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.