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Not sure why this is getting backlash. Just look at https://fund.blender.org https://fund.blender.org. Other corporate sponsors are Google, Meta, Nvidia, Netfli

by bicx 5mo ago

Not sure why this is getting backlash. Just look at https://fund.blender.org https://fund.blender.org. Other corporate sponsors are Google, Meta, Nvidia, Netflix, even Adidas. This just means more support for a major OSS project.

bakugo 5mo ago
A lot of those companies likely sponsor it because they use it themselves, and actively benefit from its continued development. The incentives are at least somewhat aligned. I doubt Anthropic has much use for such a tool internally. They're sponsoring it because they want to inject their slop into it and replace the people who do use it.
- NitpickLawyer 5mo ago
  > They're sponsoring it because they want to inject their slop into it and replace the people who do use it. Oh, noes, the horrors of democratising access to an expert tool. What will onshape do now, that the free one is accessible to oom more regular people that could use a 3d shape but don't have the time to learn a very complicated yet powerful tool? I guess people have said the same about game engines / coding tools that help artists turn their vision into working, compiling games, right? Riiight?
  - slopinthebag 5mo ago
    It's not democratising access to an expert tool, it's devaluing the skill, expertise, and hard work required to create art. edit: I seem to be rate limited and unable to reply? I'll paste it here: I'm sorry but I don't agree. People care about art when it is extraordinary, in the same way people watch professional sport because it is extraordinary, or they watch cooking shows because it's extraordinary. What you call "democratisation" I would call the trivialisation of something which used to take effort into something which does not. People don't watch random people who have never played soccer before at the World Cup, they don't watch someone who can barely cook Kraft dinner cook on MasterChef, and they don't go to museums to look at someone's first sketch. There is no reason to assume that the trivialisation of art wouldn't simply devalue the medium to the point of irrelevance. However since people seek what is extraordinary, you will always have gates which are kept, and for good reason. edit 2, responding to hbosch: You don't have to be an extraordinary soccer player to enjoy playing soccer, but that doesn't mean we should develop a pill that makes everyone a great soccer player with no skill development or effort required. We don't watch professional sports just to see a ball move fast, we watch to see what a human is capable of through discipline and hard work. If everyone could take a pill to become an elite athlete, the sport wouldn't be democratized, it would be deleted. When you remove the effort barrier you don't make art easier, you collapse the meaning of striving for excellence. If the 'expert' and the 'novice' produce the same result with the same button press, we haven't empowered the novice, we’ve just made the expertise irrelevant. Tools like Blender are force multipliers for human intent, generative AI is a replacement for it. If you use Blender to make a "stupid little game," you’ve gained a skill. If you use AI to generate the assets for that game, you haven't gained a skill, you’ve simply acted as a manager for an automated system. The value of that game to the creator isn't just the code, it’s the fact that they built it. I find it really hard to believe that people find value besides the initial novelty in having a computer generate stupid little games - for what purpose? If nobody is going to play it, and you haven't built it, precisely where does the value in it come from? It's like a simulacrum of human creation. What I actually see is people who are unwilling to put in the effort but seek the rewards anyways. They want the accolades from creation but without the hard work. I dont see the value in enabling this.
    - bicx 5mo ago
      Sorry, this is not a good argument. It's sad that some skills are devalued when so many have invested years into them, but it is a net win when more people can create something without having to become an expert. Experts don't deserve to have a moat built around them. I say this as a software engineer with 16yoe who is dealing with the same challenges.
      - bakugo 5mo ago
        Please explain how this is a net win beyond the extremely narrow-minded belief that more equals better. Do you believe it's a good thing that all software is becoming noticeably lower quality? Do you believe it's a good thing that open source is on its death bed now that licenses don't mean anything and popular projects are drowning under AI generated PR spam? Even here on HN, Show HN is effectively dead as almost every single submission is some boring garbage generated in 30 minutes that nobody cares about, not even the person who submitted it. Experts don't need to have a moat built around them, because they build their own moats with their skills and efforts. Just because you get jealous and feel entitled to the fruits of the experts' labor while being unwilling to put in the same work does not mean you have the right to steal their work and mix it up in a computer algorithm so you can later claim it as yours.
      - hirako2000 5mo ago
        The concerns are: proliferation of slop, en masse. prosperity of artists who live off their work to be rendered impossible. It's already quite dire for them. The upside? A new generation of content creator who may profit from automation. We never had problems creating art. In fact, what's artistic is relative to the effort involved in the creation process; also, access to technology available at the time. To me the argument is valid. It's devaluing the skills of existing artists, and the decade long investment they likely put into their craft.
        hbosch 5mo ago
        Unity enabled a flood of slop games long ago. Dreamweaver enabled countless slop websites. Photoshop delivered us heaps of slop images. Amazon delivers thousands of slop products from slop manufacturers every day. The slop isn't coming, it arrived decades ago. The Pandora's box of slop is already open. Maybe AI widens the aperture, but if you cannot handle the discernment required to separate slop from something useful or meaningful, that is your problem.
- dannyw 5mo ago
  I don't think any slop is getting injected into Blender: > Blender Foundation’s mission remains to empower artists with free/open source technology and tools. Yet, we also maintain APIs for individuals and corporations to extend Blender, also beyond what’s aligned with Blender’s mission. We consider this part of the Software Freedom that’s embodied with Blender’s GNU GPL license.
- hbosch 5mo ago
  There is no scenario where more people using Blender is bad for Blender.
- jonas21 5mo ago
  Or perhaps they're sponsoring it so artists can spend less time fiddling with Blender's UI and more time creating art?
  - bakugo 5mo ago
    Why would Anthropic want people to "create" art when they can "generate" it instead?
- unrelat3d 5mo ago
  Unrelated but what do you all get from this endless speculation about others motives? To me it just comes across like the stereotype of a lonely house wife peaking through the blinds judging the neighbors. This forum is just as absurd as Reddit but in a subtle way; politically correct language without the zany memes but nonetheless absurd sense of self righteousness and importance and the validity of endless unsubstantiated assertions and qualifications. As if not posting about Harambe affords legitimacy while posting what boils down to intrusive thoughts about people and motives y'all are removed from. The nostalgia fueled appeals to preserve your grasp of reality specifically are just a modern conservatism. Time moves on and has as little obligation to stand still for HN doomers as it does adherents of traditional religions, contemporary American capitalism . The horse and buggy and rotary phone and other engineers screwed out of careers by off shoring playing a tiny violin for script kiddies who grew up to become expert Python and DevOps engineers. Get over yourself. Your efforts are a drop in the ocean of human effort. Ffs this comes off as some fine whine.
hirako2000 5mo ago
Blender didn't have support from big tech for decades and has flourished. It's now on par with top of the line proprietary 3d software. The upside is meaningless compared to what's at risk when for-profit grows influence.
- jonas21 5mo ago
  Google has been supporting Blender for over 20 years, initially through Summer of Code [1, 2], and also via corporate sponsorship once Blender started offering it. And I'm pretty sure I've seen most of the other big names in tech on the sponsors page for many years now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code [2] https://code.blender.org/2011/04/google-summer-of-code-2011-blender-summer-of-polish-2/ https://code.blender.org/2011/04/google-summer-of-code-2011-...
teeray 5mo ago
Because Blender is a tool for making art and Anthropic makes tools for stealing art
- ollin 5mo ago
  AFAIK Anthropic hasn't built any image or video generation tools yet, just text/code generation. OpenAI/Google/xAI all built image/video generation teams though so it may only be a matter of time.
  - Palmik 5mo ago
    Surely art also exists in textual realm.
- atleastoptimal 5mo ago
  Saying stuff like this about any AI company is silly and makes critics sound more like stochastic parrots than AI models themselves. Anthropic hasn't even shipped an image or video model. What is "stealing art", the fact that AI models are trained on data? What constitutes stealing in that?
  - HDBaseT 5mo ago
    I would probably consider books to be a form of art. Art is very varied, its not just paintings or photographs. Video games can be art, music can be art (artists!), an eloquent dance can be art.
    - atleastoptimal 5mo ago
      I agree books are a form of art. However I wouldn't call AI training on text in books "stealing art"
    - DonsDiscountGas 5mo ago
      Do you consider reading a book and remembering what you read to be a form of stealing? How about writing a book review?

by bicx 5mo ago

bakugo 5mo ago

A lot of those companies likely sponsor it because they use it themselves, and actively benefit from its continued development. The incentives are at least somewhat aligned. I doubt Anthropic has much use for such a tool internally. They're sponsoring it because they want to inject their slop into it and replace the people who do use it.

NitpickLawyer 5mo ago
> They're sponsoring it because they want to inject their slop into it and replace the people who do use it. Oh, noes, the horrors of democratising access to an expert tool. What will onshape do now, that the free one is accessible to oom more regular people that could use a 3d shape but don't have the time to learn a very complicated yet powerful tool? I guess people have said the same about game engines / coding tools that help artists turn their vision into working, compiling games, right? Riiight?
- slopinthebag 5mo ago
  It's not democratising access to an expert tool, it's devaluing the skill, expertise, and hard work required to create art. edit: I seem to be rate limited and unable to reply? I'll paste it here: I'm sorry but I don't agree. People care about art when it is extraordinary, in the same way people watch professional sport because it is extraordinary, or they watch cooking shows because it's extraordinary. What you call "democratisation" I would call the trivialisation of something which used to take effort into something which does not. People don't watch random people who have never played soccer before at the World Cup, they don't watch someone who can barely cook Kraft dinner cook on MasterChef, and they don't go to museums to look at someone's first sketch. There is no reason to assume that the trivialisation of art wouldn't simply devalue the medium to the point of irrelevance. However since people seek what is extraordinary, you will always have gates which are kept, and for good reason. edit 2, responding to hbosch: You don't have to be an extraordinary soccer player to enjoy playing soccer, but that doesn't mean we should develop a pill that makes everyone a great soccer player with no skill development or effort required. We don't watch professional sports just to see a ball move fast, we watch to see what a human is capable of through discipline and hard work. If everyone could take a pill to become an elite athlete, the sport wouldn't be democratized, it would be deleted. When you remove the effort barrier you don't make art easier, you collapse the meaning of striving for excellence. If the 'expert' and the 'novice' produce the same result with the same button press, we haven't empowered the novice, we’ve just made the expertise irrelevant. Tools like Blender are force multipliers for human intent, generative AI is a replacement for it. If you use Blender to make a "stupid little game," you’ve gained a skill. If you use AI to generate the assets for that game, you haven't gained a skill, you’ve simply acted as a manager for an automated system. The value of that game to the creator isn't just the code, it’s the fact that they built it. I find it really hard to believe that people find value besides the initial novelty in having a computer generate stupid little games - for what purpose? If nobody is going to play it, and you haven't built it, precisely where does the value in it come from? It's like a simulacrum of human creation. What I actually see is people who are unwilling to put in the effort but seek the rewards anyways. They want the accolades from creation but without the hard work. I dont see the value in enabling this.
  - bicx 5mo ago
    Sorry, this is not a good argument. It's sad that some skills are devalued when so many have invested years into them, but it is a net win when more people can create something without having to become an expert. Experts don't deserve to have a moat built around them. I say this as a software engineer with 16yoe who is dealing with the same challenges.
    - bakugo 5mo ago
      Please explain how this is a net win beyond the extremely narrow-minded belief that more equals better. Do you believe it's a good thing that all software is becoming noticeably lower quality? Do you believe it's a good thing that open source is on its death bed now that licenses don't mean anything and popular projects are drowning under AI generated PR spam? Even here on HN, Show HN is effectively dead as almost every single submission is some boring garbage generated in 30 minutes that nobody cares about, not even the person who submitted it. Experts don't need to have a moat built around them, because they build their own moats with their skills and efforts. Just because you get jealous and feel entitled to the fruits of the experts' labor while being unwilling to put in the same work does not mean you have the right to steal their work and mix it up in a computer algorithm so you can later claim it as yours.
    - hirako2000 5mo ago
      The concerns are: proliferation of slop, en masse. prosperity of artists who live off their work to be rendered impossible. It's already quite dire for them. The upside? A new generation of content creator who may profit from automation. We never had problems creating art. In fact, what's artistic is relative to the effort involved in the creation process; also, access to technology available at the time. To me the argument is valid. It's devaluing the skills of existing artists, and the decade long investment they likely put into their craft.
      - hbosch 5mo ago
        Unity enabled a flood of slop games long ago. Dreamweaver enabled countless slop websites. Photoshop delivered us heaps of slop images. Amazon delivers thousands of slop products from slop manufacturers every day. The slop isn't coming, it arrived decades ago. The Pandora's box of slop is already open. Maybe AI widens the aperture, but if you cannot handle the discernment required to separate slop from something useful or meaningful, that is your problem.
dannyw 5mo ago
I don't think any slop is getting injected into Blender: > Blender Foundation’s mission remains to empower artists with free/open source technology and tools. Yet, we also maintain APIs for individuals and corporations to extend Blender, also beyond what’s aligned with Blender’s mission. We consider this part of the Software Freedom that’s embodied with Blender’s GNU GPL license.
hbosch 5mo ago
There is no scenario where more people using Blender is bad for Blender.
jonas21 5mo ago
Or perhaps they're sponsoring it so artists can spend less time fiddling with Blender's UI and more time creating art?
- bakugo 5mo ago
  Why would Anthropic want people to "create" art when they can "generate" it instead?
unrelat3d 5mo ago
Unrelated but what do you all get from this endless speculation about others motives? To me it just comes across like the stereotype of a lonely house wife peaking through the blinds judging the neighbors. This forum is just as absurd as Reddit but in a subtle way; politically correct language without the zany memes but nonetheless absurd sense of self righteousness and importance and the validity of endless unsubstantiated assertions and qualifications. As if not posting about Harambe affords legitimacy while posting what boils down to intrusive thoughts about people and motives y'all are removed from. The nostalgia fueled appeals to preserve your grasp of reality specifically are just a modern conservatism. Time moves on and has as little obligation to stand still for HN doomers as it does adherents of traditional religions, contemporary American capitalism . The horse and buggy and rotary phone and other engineers screwed out of careers by off shoring playing a tiny violin for script kiddies who grew up to become expert Python and DevOps engineers. Get over yourself. Your efforts are a drop in the ocean of human effort. Ffs this comes off as some fine whine.

hirako2000 5mo ago

Blender didn't have support from big tech for decades and has flourished. It's now on par with top of the line proprietary 3d software. The upside is meaningless compared to what's at risk when for-profit grows influence.

jonas21 5mo ago
Google has been supporting Blender for over 20 years, initially through Summer of Code [1, 2], and also via corporate sponsorship once Blender started offering it. And I'm pretty sure I've seen most of the other big names in tech on the sponsors page for many years now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code [2] https://code.blender.org/2011/04/google-summer-of-code-2011-blender-summer-of-polish-2/ https://code.blender.org/2011/04/google-summer-of-code-2011-...

teeray 5mo ago

Because Blender is a tool for making art and Anthropic makes tools for stealing art

ollin 5mo ago
AFAIK Anthropic hasn't built any image or video generation tools yet, just text/code generation. OpenAI/Google/xAI all built image/video generation teams though so it may only be a matter of time.
- Palmik 5mo ago
  Surely art also exists in textual realm.
atleastoptimal 5mo ago
Saying stuff like this about any AI company is silly and makes critics sound more like stochastic parrots than AI models themselves. Anthropic hasn't even shipped an image or video model. What is "stealing art", the fact that AI models are trained on data? What constitutes stealing in that?
- HDBaseT 5mo ago
  I would probably consider books to be a form of art. Art is very varied, its not just paintings or photographs. Video games can be art, music can be art (artists!), an eloquent dance can be art.
  - atleastoptimal 5mo ago
    I agree books are a form of art. However I wouldn't call AI training on text in books "stealing art"
  - DonsDiscountGas 5mo ago
    Do you consider reading a book and remembering what you read to be a form of stealing? How about writing a book review?