It's easier than ever to de-censor videos

> Years ago it would've required a supercomputer and a PhD to do this stuff

This isn't actually true. You could do this 20 years ago on a consumer laptop, and you don't need the information you get for free from text moving under a filter either.

What you need is the ability to reproduce the conditions the image was generated and pixelated/blurred under. If the pixel radius only encompasses, say, 4 characters, then you only need to search for those 4 characters first. And then you can proceed to the next few characters represented under the next pixelated block.

You can think of pixelation as a bad hash which is very easy to find a preimage for.

No motion necessary. No AI necessary. No machine learning necessary.

The hard part is recreating the environment though, and AI just means you can skip having that effort and know-how.

In fact, there was a famous de-censoring that happened because the censoring which happened was a simple "whirlpool" algorithm that was very easy to unwind.

If media companies want to actually censor something, nothing does better than a simple black box.

Ah yes, Mr. Swirl Face.

This was pretty different though. The decensoring algorithm I'm describing is just a linear search. But pixelation is not an invertible transformation.

Mr. Swirl Face just applied a swirl to his face, which is invertible (-ish, with some data lost), and could naively be reversed. (I am pretty sure someone on 4chan did it before the authorities did, but this might just be an Internet Legend).

Christopher Paul Neil is a real person who went to jail.