6 ms·

I don't really get the backlash about Blender here, this isn't generative art, it's basically a natural language means of scripting blender. This feels like th

by hgoel 6mo ago

I don't really get the backlash about Blender here, this isn't generative art, it's basically a natural language means of scripting blender. This feels like the proper way to have AI act as a tool to make artist's jobs easier without taking away their creativity? Edit: I guess they might want absolutely no AI of any sort in their tools (which seems like a strange line to draw), or is it about the data it's been trained on?

blurbleblurble 6mo ago
People are guzzling the amygdala control juice these days
- make3 6mo ago
  Say that again in five years when you can't find a job except mega yatch toilet cleaner because Claude is distinguished engineer level for one millionth of your cost and thousands of times faster, and can be instantly parallelized in the tens or hundreds of thousands just to be spun down arbitrarily as needed at any time
  - oompydoompy74 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    - esafak 6mo ago
      He exaggerates but several studies show that AI is depressing junior hiring, and models are only going to get more competitive with humans.
    - make3 6mo ago
      The transformer paper was 9 years ago. 9 years between barely translating alright between two very closely related languages (English and French, huge fraction of shared words because of William the conqueror and cultural proximity etc etc) and what we have now. The thing is able to code up full pretty competent thousand lines projects in an hour. Even hardcore engineers use it now, as of this year. My senior front end friends already can't find jobs. You're crazy if you think things won't change dramatically, at the scale of all of society. https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
      - rimliu 6mo ago
        https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
        bryanrasmussen 6mo ago
        It's funny because you're arguing that 1 month showing 1 variable increasing by 1 point is as reliable as 9 years with continual increase among multiple variables by multiple points when trying to extrapolate a trend.
    - nozzlegear 6mo ago
      It may be hyperbole, but it's how people genuinely feel about AI. Qunnipiac in March found that voters like AI less than ICE. They also found that over half of Americans think AI will do more harm than good: https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3955 https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3955 A Gallup poll in February found only 18% of Gen Z participants surveyed were hopeful about AI: https://www.gallup.com/analytics/651674/gen-z-research.aspx https://www.gallup.com/analytics/651674/gen-z-research.aspx Maybe those AI doomers all need to touch grass. Or, maybe, the reverse is true and the minority of people who are optimistic about AI are suffering from software brain. https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-backlash-databases-automation https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba...
make3 6mo ago
There is no acceptable use of AI for most people in the artistic field. They see it as an extreme treason, and I understand. They're under incredible incredible threat. They are conscious of preventing momentum in a bad direction. If they don't fight it hyper hard, a huge fraction of them will be out of a job instantly.
- hgoel 6mo ago
  That's a strange position to take. I can understand not wanting models that have been trained on questionably sourced data, but otherwise they're opposing essentially a UX change, not based on UX concerns but on ideological fears. Given how much software and other AI/computer vision improvements 3D content often relies on, it's weird to decide that the algorithm itself is unallowable.
  - mbgerring 6mo ago
    Do you have any idea how hard it already is to make a living in a creative field?
  - make3 6mo ago
    This is a very first degree analysis. AI is seen as an oppressor and a threat, and AI providers are seen as oppressors. It's understandable that people don't want to collaborate with their oppressors, either direct or by association. If you were a Jew, would you buy shoes from the Nazis just because you were individually safe from them at that moment? Or would you if you were of a minority they hadn't started exterminating yet? Or if they were not exactly the Nazis killing your people but some affiliated group? This sounds extreme until you realize they are under threat of losing their likelihood for good. They are right to not accept your inevitability point without a fight, this is a human thing that can be fought, revolutions have happened, and will continue to happen. I don't necessarily agree with this but I do understand it.
  - FireBeyond 6mo ago
    > I can understand not wanting models that have been trained on questionably sourced data, but otherwise they're opposing essentially a UX change, not based on UX concerns but on ideological fears. "If you ignore their biggest, their primary, concern, their other concerns seem almost trivial".
swatcoder 6mo ago
Regardless of the purported upside, many people in the arts feel betrayed by the commercial interests that built this technology on their work without their consent and threatened by the explicit intent of these vendors to devalue their work by saturating the art and design market with cheap automated substitution. A lot of artists who would love to be able to direct their professional software in natural language have to reconcile that with how this technology came to be and what the aims are of the company now delivering it to them.
- hgoel 6mo ago
  Yeah, I can understand being upset with their work being stolen to train these models. Anthropic doesn't seem to be working on image/video generation, but they are still training on text-based creative works of questionable sourcing. Makes me think that there's some room in the model lineup for one that doesn't do as well on benchmarks, but is trained on "ethically sourced" data (though they'd need to somehow prove that they aren't "accidentally" including other data).
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- dmarcos 6mo ago
  I spent most of my career in the open source world and doesn’t bother me models are trained on my output. Should I feel differently? It seems there’s a kind of ego or emotional attachment to the output that is more common among artists than devs? Perhaps abundance vs scarcity mindsets?
  - hgoel 6mo ago
    Regarding generative images, it's more of an issue because the effects are different. Software tends to be a "living" project, so just vibe coding with 0 software knowledge is not yet fully sustainable for maintaining a project. But with art, the AI just spits out a completed image. The generated images compete directly with the people the data was sourced from, and there have also been many cases of abuse, eg people using AI to impersonate a popular artist and selling comissions under that artist's name. The copyright situation for generated imagery is also tricky, so people pretending to be artists only to be sharing work that isn't copyrightable can cause a ton of trouble and financial loss for customers. Most of these issues don't apply to software in the same way. That's why I was surprised by the backlash to this as it's just touching the software side, I don't see this as threatening artist's work. When I was dabbling in image generation (~StyleGAN2 era), my vision for image generation models was as a support tool for artists (back then I was generating small character thumbnails to help me brainstorm ideas for drawing), believing that people valued art for the human effort. Even then I would have considered what Anthropic are trying to do here as the preferable way to use AI in art workflows.
simonw 6mo ago
I think it's mainly anti-AI sentiment in general.
- consumer451 6mo ago
  I am a huge beneficiary of agentic dev tools. They completely changed my life and my income. However, I totally get the general anti-AI sentiment. The ultra-bear case is that it somehow kills all of us, the bull case is that those who own the inference get the all the spoils. Even myself, while I am currently extremely empowered by these tools... I could see my role (Founder/PM/builder) disappearing in the next couple years. I respect you a lot, so if you have a moment, I would really like to get talked down from my take.
  - shinryuu 6mo ago
    How and why did it change your income?
    - consumer451 6mo ago
      My dev skills had atrophied long ago, my career felt like it was at a weird dead-end. I was still very aware of various technologies, but didn't know the syntax of every latest framework. I still had b2b product ideas, but was never able to raise funding. I built an MVP in 2 weeks, got a co-founder to pay for my beans and rice for the year spent building, getting feedback, and refining. We now have paying users.
      - meetingthrower 6mo ago
        This is it. Great job. I'm in same boat having been a tech pm in the '01 era but having moved over to business side after. Now having fun building tech stuff again!
ehnto 6mo ago
It's really clear that businesses are hoping to replace people with AI. In an industry that is already very difficult to make a stable living in, and troubled with regular plagiarism, is it really that surprising that any encroachment of AI into that space would be met with backlash? Even if you can see how individual circumstances could be beneficial to your workflow, it's a general direction I think many take issue with quite fairly.
- Joel_Mckay 6mo ago
  Businesses have already replaced several background artists gambling on the uncopyrightable status of "AI" output being ignored. In a comercial setting, one can't sell what they never owned in the first place. Without a constant stream of stolen training data, the "AI" piracy bleed-through and isomorphic plagiarism business model is unsustainable. We look forward to liquidating the GPU data-centers at a heavy discount. =3
  - locknitpicker 6mo ago
    > Businesses have already replaced several background artists gambling on the uncopyrightable status of "AI" output being ignored. In a comercial setting, one can't sell what they never owned in the first place. I'm skeptical of this line of reasoning. Major content providers have no problem with copyright, even when content is completely produced by anonymous contributors. Is this supposed to become an issue when you eliminate some anonymous contributors?
    - Joel_Mckay 6mo ago
      >Major content providers have no problem with copyright Besides getting sued for piracy, settling out-of-court with Disney, and or externalizing DMCA/RIAA take-down liabilities on users. A human may transfer rights or "license" to another party in many circumstances, but may not re-sell a codified Coca-Cola logo trademark out of convenience. All levels of the US courts concluded an "AI" can't transfer nor actually create content rights. Most WIPO members also seemed to follow the same consensus. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260414-the-monkey-selfie-that-predicted-the-ai-age https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260414-the-monkey-selfi... There was a similar issue with folks selling marginally pitch-shifted audio assets on the Unity and Web stores. Note, they didn't have the original legal right to license this content, and customers would get their content flagged eventually. Some kids are cheeky pirating Sony and BBC libraries... exploiting peoples assumption buying an old CD set somehow magically gives the holder broadcast or game distribution rights. Keep being skeptical, as it will keep you in business. =3
ihsw 6mo ago
[dead]
mediaman 6mo ago
The funny thing is that Allegorithmic (now part of Adobe) was far more devastating to certain classes of game artist than stuff like this will be in its current form. It almost totally automated vast swaths of texture generation by creating algorithmic systems that technical artists could use to create textures. Want a brick texture? Sure, you connect some nodes and set parameters and you have great looking bricks. Want the mortar to be a little more widely spaced? Done. Want some moss on the brick? Want some chipping on the brick? Want some color variation? Done, done, done. It probably reduced the amount of time to iterate textures by more than 100x. Now, talented technical artists make OK money because they are good at using these tools. Photoshop jockies are gone. LLM manipulation of Blender will be interesting but it's very, very challenging to see the path of something like Claude having nearly as big of an impact. It'll be helpful to automate some common tasks, to build internal tooling. But Allegorithmic single handedly changed the way 3D games look, because you could be so much more ambitious. You didn't really hear about it, though, because it wasn't part of the cultural zeitgeist.
torginus 6mo ago
It's not artist replacement yet because they dont have the necessary training or sophistication. I doubt the current state shows the end of their ambitions.
mbgerring 6mo ago
People who built a career on their mastery of Blender are going to lose their livelihoods. Why is this difficult to understand?
- bayarearefugee 6mo ago
  > Why is this difficult to understand? It'll be way easier to understand for developers when it starts happening in earnest to our profession, which is coming soon. It already is here to some extent, but so far mostly on the junior end so it hasn't been impacting many people who are already established in an industry that has provided relatively easy stable livelihoods for the past 30+ years, but soon won't.
  - movedx01 6mo ago
    > coming soon The developers are literally on the bleeding edge here, it might be the most developed of the AI use cases right now. The most advanced tooling for LLMs revolves around SWE work, there are multiple prolific benchmarks that the labs are actively targeting in this area, and new ones are being built, whole product categories being spawned, software companies bleeding money for tokens. It's the other professions that are to follow once the training data is in place to go reach for their livelihoods. SWEs got the early taste of what is coming. And the blender news is exactly that.
JKCalhoun 6mo ago
"Edit: I guess they might want absolutely no AI of any sort in their tools…" Which it seems like they can just choose not to use? Maybe the blowback has more to do with gatekeeping.
LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
I am a musician and deeply morally opposed to any form of generative AI that has unauthorized training data. That means I am morally opposed to any useful system. This seems to be a majority opinion among creatives: they are plagiarism machines built on stolen data. Using them for anything is always unacceptable.

by hgoel 6mo ago

blurbleblurble 6mo ago

People are guzzling the amygdala control juice these days

make3 6mo ago
Say that again in five years when you can't find a job except mega yatch toilet cleaner because Claude is distinguished engineer level for one millionth of your cost and thousands of times faster, and can be instantly parallelized in the tens or hundreds of thousands just to be spun down arbitrarily as needed at any time
- oompydoompy74 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - esafak 6mo ago
    He exaggerates but several studies show that AI is depressing junior hiring, and models are only going to get more competitive with humans.
  - make3 6mo ago
    The transformer paper was 9 years ago. 9 years between barely translating alright between two very closely related languages (English and French, huge fraction of shared words because of William the conqueror and cultural proximity etc etc) and what we have now. The thing is able to code up full pretty competent thousand lines projects in an hour. Even hardcore engineers use it now, as of this year. My senior front end friends already can't find jobs. You're crazy if you think things won't change dramatically, at the scale of all of society. https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
    - rimliu 6mo ago
      https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
      - bryanrasmussen 6mo ago
        It's funny because you're arguing that 1 month showing 1 variable increasing by 1 point is as reliable as 9 years with continual increase among multiple variables by multiple points when trying to extrapolate a trend.
  - nozzlegear 6mo ago
    It may be hyperbole, but it's how people genuinely feel about AI. Qunnipiac in March found that voters like AI less than ICE. They also found that over half of Americans think AI will do more harm than good: https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3955 https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3955 A Gallup poll in February found only 18% of Gen Z participants surveyed were hopeful about AI: https://www.gallup.com/analytics/651674/gen-z-research.aspx https://www.gallup.com/analytics/651674/gen-z-research.aspx Maybe those AI doomers all need to touch grass. Or, maybe, the reverse is true and the minority of people who are optimistic about AI are suffering from software brain. https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-backlash-databases-automation https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba...

make3 6mo ago

There is no acceptable use of AI for most people in the artistic field. They see it as an extreme treason, and I understand. They're under incredible incredible threat. They are conscious of preventing momentum in a bad direction. If they don't fight it hyper hard, a huge fraction of them will be out of a job instantly.

hgoel 6mo ago
That's a strange position to take. I can understand not wanting models that have been trained on questionably sourced data, but otherwise they're opposing essentially a UX change, not based on UX concerns but on ideological fears. Given how much software and other AI/computer vision improvements 3D content often relies on, it's weird to decide that the algorithm itself is unallowable.
- mbgerring 6mo ago
  Do you have any idea how hard it already is to make a living in a creative field?
- make3 6mo ago
  This is a very first degree analysis. AI is seen as an oppressor and a threat, and AI providers are seen as oppressors. It's understandable that people don't want to collaborate with their oppressors, either direct or by association. If you were a Jew, would you buy shoes from the Nazis just because you were individually safe from them at that moment? Or would you if you were of a minority they hadn't started exterminating yet? Or if they were not exactly the Nazis killing your people but some affiliated group? This sounds extreme until you realize they are under threat of losing their likelihood for good. They are right to not accept your inevitability point without a fight, this is a human thing that can be fought, revolutions have happened, and will continue to happen. I don't necessarily agree with this but I do understand it.
- FireBeyond 6mo ago
  > I can understand not wanting models that have been trained on questionably sourced data, but otherwise they're opposing essentially a UX change, not based on UX concerns but on ideological fears. "If you ignore their biggest, their primary, concern, their other concerns seem almost trivial".

swatcoder 6mo ago

Regardless of the purported upside, many people in the arts feel betrayed by the commercial interests that built this technology on their work without their consent and threatened by the explicit intent of these vendors to devalue their work by saturating the art and design market with cheap automated substitution. A lot of artists who would love to be able to direct their professional software in natural language have to reconcile that with how this technology came to be and what the aims are of the company now delivering it to them.

hgoel 6mo ago
Yeah, I can understand being upset with their work being stolen to train these models. Anthropic doesn't seem to be working on image/video generation, but they are still training on text-based creative works of questionable sourcing. Makes me think that there's some room in the model lineup for one that doesn't do as well on benchmarks, but is trained on "ethically sourced" data (though they'd need to somehow prove that they aren't "accidentally" including other data).
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
dmarcos 6mo ago
I spent most of my career in the open source world and doesn’t bother me models are trained on my output. Should I feel differently? It seems there’s a kind of ego or emotional attachment to the output that is more common among artists than devs? Perhaps abundance vs scarcity mindsets?
- hgoel 6mo ago
  Regarding generative images, it's more of an issue because the effects are different. Software tends to be a "living" project, so just vibe coding with 0 software knowledge is not yet fully sustainable for maintaining a project. But with art, the AI just spits out a completed image. The generated images compete directly with the people the data was sourced from, and there have also been many cases of abuse, eg people using AI to impersonate a popular artist and selling comissions under that artist's name. The copyright situation for generated imagery is also tricky, so people pretending to be artists only to be sharing work that isn't copyrightable can cause a ton of trouble and financial loss for customers. Most of these issues don't apply to software in the same way. That's why I was surprised by the backlash to this as it's just touching the software side, I don't see this as threatening artist's work. When I was dabbling in image generation (~StyleGAN2 era), my vision for image generation models was as a support tool for artists (back then I was generating small character thumbnails to help me brainstorm ideas for drawing), believing that people valued art for the human effort. Even then I would have considered what Anthropic are trying to do here as the preferable way to use AI in art workflows.

simonw 6mo ago

I think it's mainly anti-AI sentiment in general.

consumer451 6mo ago
I am a huge beneficiary of agentic dev tools. They completely changed my life and my income. However, I totally get the general anti-AI sentiment. The ultra-bear case is that it somehow kills all of us, the bull case is that those who own the inference get the all the spoils. Even myself, while I am currently extremely empowered by these tools... I could see my role (Founder/PM/builder) disappearing in the next couple years. I respect you a lot, so if you have a moment, I would really like to get talked down from my take.
- shinryuu 6mo ago
  How and why did it change your income?
  - consumer451 6mo ago
    My dev skills had atrophied long ago, my career felt like it was at a weird dead-end. I was still very aware of various technologies, but didn't know the syntax of every latest framework. I still had b2b product ideas, but was never able to raise funding. I built an MVP in 2 weeks, got a co-founder to pay for my beans and rice for the year spent building, getting feedback, and refining. We now have paying users.
    - meetingthrower 6mo ago
      This is it. Great job. I'm in same boat having been a tech pm in the '01 era but having moved over to business side after. Now having fun building tech stuff again!

ehnto 6mo ago

It's really clear that businesses are hoping to replace people with AI. In an industry that is already very difficult to make a stable living in, and troubled with regular plagiarism, is it really that surprising that any encroachment of AI into that space would be met with backlash? Even if you can see how individual circumstances could be beneficial to your workflow, it's a general direction I think many take issue with quite fairly.

Joel_Mckay 6mo ago
Businesses have already replaced several background artists gambling on the uncopyrightable status of "AI" output being ignored. In a comercial setting, one can't sell what they never owned in the first place. Without a constant stream of stolen training data, the "AI" piracy bleed-through and isomorphic plagiarism business model is unsustainable. We look forward to liquidating the GPU data-centers at a heavy discount. =3
- locknitpicker 6mo ago
  > Businesses have already replaced several background artists gambling on the uncopyrightable status of "AI" output being ignored. In a comercial setting, one can't sell what they never owned in the first place. I'm skeptical of this line of reasoning. Major content providers have no problem with copyright, even when content is completely produced by anonymous contributors. Is this supposed to become an issue when you eliminate some anonymous contributors?
  - Joel_Mckay 6mo ago
    >Major content providers have no problem with copyright Besides getting sued for piracy, settling out-of-court with Disney, and or externalizing DMCA/RIAA take-down liabilities on users. A human may transfer rights or "license" to another party in many circumstances, but may not re-sell a codified Coca-Cola logo trademark out of convenience. All levels of the US courts concluded an "AI" can't transfer nor actually create content rights. Most WIPO members also seemed to follow the same consensus. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260414-the-monkey-selfie-that-predicted-the-ai-age https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260414-the-monkey-selfi... There was a similar issue with folks selling marginally pitch-shifted audio assets on the Unity and Web stores. Note, they didn't have the original legal right to license this content, and customers would get their content flagged eventually. Some kids are cheeky pirating Sony and BBC libraries... exploiting peoples assumption buying an old CD set somehow magically gives the holder broadcast or game distribution rights. Keep being skeptical, as it will keep you in business. =3

ihsw 6mo ago

[dead]

mediaman 6mo ago

The funny thing is that Allegorithmic (now part of Adobe) was far more devastating to certain classes of game artist than stuff like this will be in its current form. It almost totally automated vast swaths of texture generation by creating algorithmic systems that technical artists could use to create textures. Want a brick texture? Sure, you connect some nodes and set parameters and you have great looking bricks. Want the mortar to be a little more widely spaced? Done. Want some moss on the brick? Want some chipping on the brick? Want some color variation? Done, done, done. It probably reduced the amount of time to iterate textures by more than 100x. Now, talented technical artists make OK money because they are good at using these tools. Photoshop jockies are gone. LLM manipulation of Blender will be interesting but it's very, very challenging to see the path of something like Claude having nearly as big of an impact. It'll be helpful to automate some common tasks, to build internal tooling. But Allegorithmic single handedly changed the way 3D games look, because you could be so much more ambitious. You didn't really hear about it, though, because it wasn't part of the cultural zeitgeist.

torginus 6mo ago

It's not artist replacement yet because they dont have the necessary training or sophistication. I doubt the current state shows the end of their ambitions.

mbgerring 6mo ago

People who built a career on their mastery of Blender are going to lose their livelihoods. Why is this difficult to understand?

bayarearefugee 6mo ago
> Why is this difficult to understand? It'll be way easier to understand for developers when it starts happening in earnest to our profession, which is coming soon. It already is here to some extent, but so far mostly on the junior end so it hasn't been impacting many people who are already established in an industry that has provided relatively easy stable livelihoods for the past 30+ years, but soon won't.
- movedx01 6mo ago
  > coming soon The developers are literally on the bleeding edge here, it might be the most developed of the AI use cases right now. The most advanced tooling for LLMs revolves around SWE work, there are multiple prolific benchmarks that the labs are actively targeting in this area, and new ones are being built, whole product categories being spawned, software companies bleeding money for tokens. It's the other professions that are to follow once the training data is in place to go reach for their livelihoods. SWEs got the early taste of what is coming. And the blender news is exactly that.

JKCalhoun 6mo ago

"Edit: I guess they might want absolutely no AI of any sort in their tools…" Which it seems like they can just choose not to use? Maybe the blowback has more to do with gatekeeping.

LeCompteSftware 6mo ago

I am a musician and deeply morally opposed to any form of generative AI that has unauthorized training data. That means I am morally opposed to any useful system. This seems to be a majority opinion among creatives: they are plagiarism machines built on stolen data. Using them for anything is always unacceptable.