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Comment by muhuk | Hacker News Reader

There will be community backlash. And it will not be uncalled for. Sad news.

Clearly I'm out of the loop, why would it not be uncalled for?

Because someone might argue blender is taking funding from an entity that wants to make proficient blender users obsolete.

Yes. It is the worst possible match right now.

Or it might allow proficient blender users to become more productive, resulting in higher detailed scenes for the same budget.

We'll see how it shakes out. As a non-proficient Blender user, I'm kinda keen on this since I have had a lot of ideas that I haven't been able to realize in Blender.

So reducing budgets and suppressing wages then, what a great deal for the workers who have specialised in this field and who's work and effort the LLM has been trained on to replace them!

This is like arguing we should only have manual looms because the mechanical looms suppress wages and destroy the livelihoods of those expert loom operators.

The tech is here. We can fight it, or adapt and embrace it.

If previous examples from the industrial revolution are anything to go by, fighting automation is a losing battle.

Difference is that those tools modernised the work and actually created jobs. The ultimate aim of these AI sociopaths is to remove all work in all areas so they can hoover up all the money and let people starve.

I won't argue with that.

But, there is plenty of open source stuff out there to enable people to have their own models, running on their own hardware. Business does not need to go to the big 3.

Business doesn't need to go to the big 3, but it will. The big companies will ensure that smaller, specialised or open models get restricted by laws paid for by their lobbying budgets, so that they can pull up the ladder after them and solidify their position. They've invested billions and will never allow the world become some tech utopia where we all have a personalised free AI in our pocket, they will guarantee their own dominance.

That is not possible because that's not how money works. One way you can tell it's not possible is that it's the plot of Atlas Shrugged.

Sadly so and it is the people who don't even fund open source projects.

Yep. Anthropic's motives are obviously self-interested (Cluade <-> Blender integration), but I'm not donating to Blender, are you? That's the problem, we all want Blender to be able to pick and choose donations, but when all OSS is cash-strapped, it is easier said than done.

I'd prefer Blender get some additional funding out of this AI bubble at least.

> I'm not donating to Blender, are you?

Exactly right. Everyone online is all to happy to proclaim what hill other people should die on, but is rarely willing to go up there themselves.

This inspired me to send them something, and I noticed that they have an activity feed for donations at https://fund.blender.org

it seems pretty active, albeit small donations at a time.

I don't think they can tell Blender what to do. As such it's just more money for Blender! Yes, Anthropic can use the Python API to do their AI BS, but an improved Python API is also good for anyone else. This doesn't mean that Blender themselves are integrating any gen AI (if you don't already count the denoise filters). Do you really think Blender should have denied the donation?

I think they should have, it does not align with their community. Could they have denied, I am not sure about the legalities.

Money is good. But not antagonizing your community (as an open source project) is better.

Shame that we have to choose between better financing of Blender for features we already want (Python API quality) and placating imo overly dramatic artists.

I think the worries of artists over gen AI are valid. I guess all the better that some of the money of those "not yet" profitable AI companies goes to a good open source project and not to some of their usual practices.

I don't think it's just placating artists. Most Blender sponsors want more people getting good at Blender. Anthropic benefits if fewer people have to.

What do you mean?

A lot of 3D artists and VFX artists hate AI. Social media is full of them.

Some of them, like the illustrious MrDoob (behind Threejs), love AI and are all-in on it.

The VFX folks at Corridor Crew [1] have been leaning into AI for years now and showing a healthy attitude and path forward to using AI in workflows.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@CorridorCrew

Ah thanks for clarifying it seemed like that was assumed knowledge in this thread.

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