[bakugo]

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.

[hbosch]

There is no scenario where more people using Blender is bad for Blender.

[jonas21]

Or perhaps they're sponsoring it so artists can spend less time fiddling with Blender's UI and more time creating art?

[bakugo]

Why would Anthropic want people to "create" art when they can "generate" it instead?

[dannyw]

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.

[NitpickLawyer]

> 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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[hbosch]

If I download Blender today, as a true beginner, is what I make extraordinary? If it's not, does that mean I am not allowed to use Blender? What if I want to use Blender and I am not interested in making anything extraordinary? What if I want to use Blender to make a stupid little iPhone game that no one will ever play? Is that considered extraordinary, or not? What is this criteria?

The truth is, the vast majority of art is not extraordinary, whether it comes from a canvas, a typewriter, Photoshop, or Blender. That is as true for AI as it is for humans. Likewise, the vast majority of people who kick a soccer ball will never be extraordinary soccer players.

I firmly believe that tools which enable people to get closer to their goals are always a good thing. The concept of what makes something "extraordinary" does not come from the maker, or the tool, but from the beholder. It is the audience's job to discern what is and isn't "extraordinary", not the makers'.

[bradyd]

By that logic, Blender shouldn't exist because it devalues the skill of hand animated art.

[bakugo]

Nobody said that. You just made that up.

[tstrimple]

Did you really create a 3d model if you didn’t hand type all of the vertex coordinates? Anything less is cheating by using cheating tools and isn’t art. Oh you had to use a deform tool? Pathetic. Can’t calculate your own circle approximations at various details? Good. If you can’t do it, it shouldn’t happen.

Honestly these people are just so weird.

[bakugo]

Why did you create an imaginary person in your head just to get mad at them?

[tstrimple]

It's all the same gate keeping bullshit of people who are afraid of losing their edge to the average person. It's been played out over and over again every single time there is an innovation that lowers the barrier to entry to a field. Adapt or perish. It's never been any different.

[a2dam]

> that doesn't mean we should develop a pill that makes everyone a great soccer player with no skill development or effort required

What are you talking about? We should absolutely do this. We should extend this to as many domains of human achievement as possible. By this logic, computers shouldn't have existed because it devalued the skill that scribes and accountants developed before word processors and spreadsheets. Blender itself is a tool that made 3D accessible to thousands of people who previously had to pay for expensive licenses, training, and SGI workstations. Literally the whole point of technology is to make more things possible for people unable to do it naturally or without great effort.

[slopinthebag]

We probably shouldn't strive for pure equity of every outcome actually.

[a2dam]

That's not the point at all and I think you know that.

[unrelat3d]

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.