Adobe identifying Adobe image manipulation software
Explanation: The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was quite fond of having official photos ‘modified’ to remove inconvenient figures - such as revolutionaries who were once more prominent than him, or being seen with people who he once supported but later came to oppose.
This is quite literally 1984 - that is to say, a significant influence on George Orwell in writing the idea of an ‘unperson’ in the novel 1984 - someone whose very existence becomes an object of denial by a totalitarian government.
For extra context, the person removed from the photo is Nikolai Yezhov, principal architect of the Great Purge, which saw the deaths of at least 700,000 people under the accusation of crimes again the USSR. He was later brought down by political rivals and executed, and Stalin put the blame of the Great Purge on him.
From Adobe’s official blog:
Adobe researchers Richard Zhang and Oliver Wang, along with their UC Berkeley collaborators, Sheng-Yu Wang, Dr. Andrew Owens, and Professor Alexei A. Efros, developed a method for detecting edits to images that were made using Photoshop’s Face Aware Liquify feature,
I’m pretty sure the Soviets weren’t using Photoshop’s Face Aware Liquify feature 🤔
I dunno who did up the Stalin photo to make it look related to the tech story, but it isn’t.
It’s a joke, not a serious usage
Stalin acting like some catty high school girl cutting her former best friend out of all the pictures
You should see what he wrote in the yearbook
“Trotsky is a fugly bitch!”
