It's easier than ever to de-censor videos

> Intuitively, blur might do better than pixelation... but that might just be my own monkey brain talking. I'd love to hear more in the comments if you've dealt with that kind of image processing in the past.

A pixelization filter at least actively removes information from an image, a Gaussian blur or box blurs are straight up invertible by deconvolution and the only reason that doesn't work out of the box is because the blurring is done with low precision (e.g. directly on 8-bit sRGB) or quantized to a low precision format afterwards.

Exactly. Do not use blur to hide information. Blurring simply "spreads out" the data, rather than removing it. Just search (you know, on Google, without an LLM) for "image unblur".

Even if the precision is low, the deconvolution process you described is still good enough to reconstruct the original text in the majority of cases.