AI Weekly Malaysia

Simon Willison published Photo Scrubber, an experimental browser tool that automatically detects and blurs faces and strips metadata from photos. He built it with GPT-6 Astra after taking a photograph of protesters and deciding he did not want to share images of strangers with identifiable faces. The detection stack is Google's MediaPipe C++ library compiled to WebAssembly via @mediapipe/tasks-vision, running the BlazeFace face detection model.

Why: It is a working example of face detection running entirely in the browser via MediaPipe WASM, which means photos are never uploaded to a server — useful if you publish images containing bystanders or clients and do not want to route them through a third-party API. The post gives no accuracy numbers or false-negative rate, so treat auto-blur as a first pass you verify by eye before publishing anything, not as anonymisation. The reusable part is the stack choice: @mediapipe/tasks-vision plus BlazeFace is a small, self-hostable detection path you can drop into your own upload pipeline.