[simonw]

Just noticed this notice added at the top of the Blender announcement of their funding from Anthropic: https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-de...

> Notice: This announcement is causing a lot of feedback. We are actively evaluating it.

Presumably a lot of Blender users work in roles that feel threatened by AI being used for computer graphics work.

Lots of negative replies on Blursky here: https://bsky.app/profile/blender.org/post/3mkkuyq3ijs2q

[hgoel]

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?

[ehnto]

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.

[locknitpicker]

> 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?

But what's the plan, then? Prevent any third party from downloading Blender and integrate it in any way with an agent?

[ehnto]

An actual plan would involve regulation, otherwise we are just complaining loudly while things march on anyway.

I fully expect things to march on anyway. I have no idea how it plays out for creative industries, I am still thinking and observing in that regard.

[joquarky]

Who gets to write the regulations?

[intended]

At this stage there is just protest and reaction.

[Joel_Mckay]

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]

> 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]

>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-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

[yorwba]

Not owning the rights to some content and somebody else owning those rights are not the same thing. If someone else owns the copyright and you redistribute their stuff without permission, they have grounds to sue you. If nobody owns the copyright, because it expired long ago or because it came into being without human creative input, you can sell it just fine. So can everyone else, of course. Now, if you put your own stuff on top, that you own the copyright to, those other people can no longer redistribute it without your permission, but you can. So there's hardly any risk in using uncopyrightable background art.

[swatcoder]

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.

[dmarcos]

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]

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.

[figassis]

It threatens because we aren’t just talking about selling your art. Artists get hired at companies to produce all kinds of work that will now be replaced by AI.

[nailk]

Artists get hired at companies because companies have the technology that made the artists work profitable, starting from book printing (public performance -> book printing -> cinema -> tv -> internet, similar to drawing -> photo -> digital). At the Public Performance / Drawing Era artists were mostly poor low class rogues. The technology made them what they are now.

They are protesting against natural technology development. To me it looks similar to taxi drivers protesting against Uber (protecting their right to scam tourists).

Did drawing artists protest against photography? Do celebrities protest against photographers selling their photos taken by them in public places?

They are right to be afraid though. What's really happening here most probably is Anthorpic buys rights to collect user trajectory data. In order to replace Blender users later.

[neya]

I'm an artist turned CTO. My perspective is really simple - theft is theft. You (not you specifically per se) can sugar coat it however you like, but copying open source codebases/work is different from stealing proprietary/licensed work without permission. It would have been ok if stealing/sharing copyrighted work was heavily normalized, but no, a lot of people have gone to prison for simply pirating DVDs and CDs and now you're telling me it's somehow ok if a corporation does it?

[dmarcos]

How come? We give IP law / copyright legitimacy but it’s not clear to me the more I think about it. If you draw something you def own the physical drawing but owning the idea of the drawing during your lifetime feels strange to me. It’s also a very recent invention and humans created art before and will create after.

[soundworlds]

I agree that copyright is foundationally wrong, but the way out has to be through a culture shift of people putting their work in Public Domain. It's not up to a private company to decide everyone else's work is public commons.

[_aavaa_]

> but owning the idea of the drawing during your lifetime feels strange to me

Oh, I wish it was limited to lifetime.

USA is currently lifetime + 70 years, and work for hire is 95 years from creation.

[neya]

The issue is not stealing the idea itself. The issue is stealing the work in its entirety - as is - with all its flaws and character intact. That's what makes art unique, right?

I would think the same goes for codebases too. On a personal note, I wrote a CMS in Elixir from scratch way before even AI was a thing. It uses a lot of proprietary flows to make it scale, helping it serve millions of requests efficiently. I certainly did not give OpenAI nor Microsoft permission to steal my code. And yet they did. Is that not theft of my Intellectual Property?

[JimDabell]

Theft is theft, but learning is not theft.

Neither is fair use, and neither is copyright infringement. But learning most definitely is not theft.

[locknitpicker]

> It would have been ok if stealing/sharing copyrighted work was heavily normalized, but no, a lot of people have gone to prison for simply pirating DVDs and CDs and now you're telling me it's somehow ok if a corporation does it?

There is no such thing as "stealing" copyrighted work. Either you have unauthorized access and/or distribution, or you don't.

Unauthorized access to copyrighted work is perfectly legal in a big chunk of the world, including western Europe. Read up on the french tradition of copyright law, particularly the provisions for personal use.

This brings us to how "people have gone to prison for simply pirating DVDs and CDs". The bulk of the cases were focused on mass commercial distribution of verbatim copies of third-party content. I'm talking about DVD-burning factories.

[Joel_Mckay]

>There is no such thing as "stealing" copyrighted work

Maybe true in places with different cultural values like China or India.

However, piracy differs from the theft-of-service data scrapers use while ignoring EULA, site usage terms, and robot exclusion standards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_services

Getting emotionally invested in "AI" fantasy marketing is irrational. Have a wonderful day =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTAwjprV3b4

[intended]

Yes?

For example, you could least feel that the world is large enough to have people with other needs, drives and ownership levels of their work.

You could also consider that this is not an even trade; artists had all their works ingested and didn’t get a commensurate stake in openAI.

You can consider that you had a choice to share when you contributed to open source. Then imagine how a counter culture artist, who despises corporate culture, must feel to have their work consumed by another rapacious tech entity.

Or you can be the filmmaker whose clients are now showing up with entire ad clips, and then decide they would rather not spend the money on CGI to complete the video - essentially demolishing work overnight.

This isn’t to say that there are not artists who are excited by this, or artist who are happy to have their art ingested. Just that the way you phrased your question evoked this answer.

[MrScruff]

Speaking as someone who works in the industry, I haven't really heard this sentiment. Artists are predominantly hostile to diffusion models, but optimistic about LLMs and their ability to help them write tools and scripts even if they're non-technical.

[rcarr]

So basically artists are cool with developers not getting paid so long as they do...

[MrScruff]

I'm not saying it's rational or fair.

[hgoel]

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).

[mediaman]

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.

[make3]

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]

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]

Do you have any idea how hard it already is to make a living in a creative field?

[FireBeyond]

> 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".

[hgoel]

I literally said I understand if the training data sourcing is their primary concern.

[make3]

he meant that that's not the primary concern. the sourcing of the data is a red herring, they care about losing their ability to make a living doing the thing that they love that is so central to their identity

[FireBeyond]

I think I'm not sure how to parse your statement... I don't think there'd be much care for (or need for) the UX change if it wasn't for the whole ideological/valid fear about training AI on creative works? But it has been a long day, so I apologize.

[make3]

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.

[2001zhaozhao]

This is the best phrasing of the issue I've seen online anywhere.

You can find AI useful and still be against its introduction into your field for entirely understandable reasons.

Unfortunately this does create uphill friction for any good-intentioned people trying to use AI to improve art by empowering people to take on more ambitious projects. (This is a general statement and not related to the case of Anthropic. Of course Anthropic here is just trying to sell their product, which is a fair thing to do in isolation, but I also understand the opposition to it on the grounds of its downstream effects.)

[xnx]

> There is no acceptable use of AI for most people in the artistic field.

For all of us, acceptable use is when I use AI to do my job. Unacceptable use is when you use AI to do my job.

[nozzlegear]

I don't think artists see it the same way. An artist will get pilloried by their peers, followers and fans if they post something that has even a whiff of generative AI.

[xnx]

Yes, but I think that still fits. Other people don't want you to use AI to do your job because it makes you more competitive.

[simianwords]

Completely false and I hate this puritan gatekeeping. Artists who hate AI are the type to put more importance on the craft than the end product itself. Art is a means of communicating something personal. It’s not meant to show off skills in how well you can move a pencil or how many fricking tools you know in adobe.

AI removes all these hurdles and directly presents you with the end problem - communication. Artists hate that because most artists don’t have anything to communicate. These people deserve to be automated away. I don’t wanna see more derivative shit. Artists who have something special to communicate won’t feel threatened by AI but feel more freedom.

[javascriptfan69]

>AI removes all these hurdles and directly presents you with the end problem - communication.

Which is why 99.9% of AI art is worthless. There's literally nothing personal or interesting about getting grok to fart out some picture you thought about while sitting on the toilet in the morning.

AI art will never be good without actual artists embracing the medium.

[simonw]

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

[consumer451]

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]

How and why did it change your income?

[consumer451]

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]

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!

[blurbleblurble]

People are guzzling the amygdala control juice these days

[make3]

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

[JKCalhoun]

"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.

[torginus]

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.

[LeCompteSftware]

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.

[mbgerring]

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

[bayarearefugee]

> 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]

> 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.

[giancarlostoro]

> Lots of negative replies on Blursky

To the surprise of no one.

[NetOpWibby]

People on Mastodon are losing their shit too[1].

I understand being unhappy about something but people gotta relax.

---

[1]: https://social.coop/@netopwibby/116483037092383210

[izacus]

Why do they "gotta relax"? Are they making you uncomfortable by voicing their opinions or why exactly?

[NetOpWibby]

Faceless losers having a fit and devolving when their energy isn’t reciprocated is kinda embarrassing, no?

[jarjoura]

I really do want to support artists, but I also feel super conflicted about what is actually at stake here if an AI agent generates a scene for me. I never would have hired a 3D artist before this moment, because there's no reason for me to. However, if I can easily poop out a 3D rendering of something custom without much time or cost, I would absolutely love to do that. How many one-off presentations or project design sessions I could have with cheap throwaway 3D artwork that provides value to explain my thought process?!

Just like AI image slop and AI book slop prove though, I highly doubt whatever Claude and Blender are cooking up will ever come close to taking a prompt like

> render a scene of a corgi sitting on a chair looking out of a window at 3 cats playing with the corgi's favorite toy.

and turning that into anything useful.