Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor.
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Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
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@Blender Honestly, I'm not sure which shocks me more: the sponsorship itself, or the fact that you're announcing it happily and proudly without considering how problematic it might be for your community.
Unfortunately, I'll take this as a sign of a pro-AI cultural shift at the Blender Foundation. What a disappointment.@davidrevoy @Blender by your logic blender was always evil: https://fund.blender.org/. Adobe, Nvidia, meta, amd, meshy.ai, they're sponsoring blender development for a long time, but it's not an issue for you?
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Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
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@Blender Honestly, I'm not sure which shocks me more: the sponsorship itself, or the fact that you're announcing it happily and proudly without considering how problematic it might be for your community.
Unfortunately, I'll take this as a sign of a pro-AI cultural shift at the Blender Foundation. What a disappointment.@davidrevoy @Blender The one thing that should be kept in mind is according to the Funding Policy, "The Blender Development Fund is a donation platform. Individuals and organizations contribute to support Blender's development without acquiring decision-making power over the project's direction."
There have been sponsors like Nvidia, Intel, AMD, etc before. While they aren't directly AI companies, they are now involved with that. While money can certainly influence, they aren't taking control of the project. I do understand your concern, I just wanted to present it from another perspective
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Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
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All right, Francesco here - CEO at Blender. I'm going to spend some time to try and respond. If you have direct questions or comments, reply here!
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Make sure to check out the full message on https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/ and the funding policy at https://fund.blender.org/funding-policy/ to get the complete picture.
@Blender
IMO, the problem is the Corporate Membership program itself:
https://download.blender.org/institute/BF_Development_Fund_Membership.pdf
In §5, you promise to keep companies' secrets. In §3, you offer (a) better transparency to these companies than the public gets, (b) allow companies to guide your priorities, & (c) special access to your staff at multiple levels.
If your agreement actually said clearly that the donations are no-strings-attached & you won't endorse or promote these companies, I think accepting #Anthropic
'd be ok.
#b3d -
Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
@Blender Disappointing to read, not only as someone that taught Blender in several countries, broadly promoting it as a cultural good way back when the project was still building its audience.
Please understand there are no companies as culturally parasitic and destructive as Anthropic. It would be less ethically bankrupt to take money from a gangster.
It is painfully foolish to pretend this is anything akin to sponsorship.
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@Blender Honestly, I'm not sure which shocks me more: the sponsorship itself, or the fact that you're announcing it happily and proudly without considering how problematic it might be for your community.
Unfortunately, I'll take this as a sign of a pro-AI cultural shift at the Blender Foundation. What a disappointment. -
@Blender Way to throw your reputation completely down the toilet. I can no longer recommend you.
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Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
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All right, Francesco here - CEO at Blender. I'm going to spend some time to try and respond. If you have direct questions or comments, reply here!
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@davidrevoy @Blender by your logic blender was always evil: https://fund.blender.org/. Adobe, Nvidia, meta, amd, meshy.ai, they're sponsoring blender development for a long time, but it's not an issue for you?
@winet@mastodon.ml @davidrevoy@framapiaf.org @Blender@mastodon.social by your logic nobody is allowed to change their mind
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️ @Simplicator @mhoye @Blender #Anthropic will crush the soul of #Blender.
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@Blender What you have done is make a public statement that the developers, or at least the management, care more about funding than they do the opinions of the artists who use the project. There was no consultation and you just created a divide between the two communities for no good reason, and hopped into bed with the people dedicated to stealing the livelihoods of artists and creators, and using their work to fuel it, along with the colossal amount of energy and water their datacenters consume.
Anthropic are not an ethical company, they stripmine the internet and artistic works harder than anyone, they use the same polluting datacenters as the other companies and are directly tied to the death of children in the middle east despite their milquetoast pushback against the Trump admin. As far as anyone is concerned, you may as well have announced a partnership with Palantir, they no better in terms of deeds, only their PR is, and you have sacrificed a lot of good will to help them with that.
You can try to spin it any way you want but the issue is not the words, it is the action. I hope you feel that loss of trust was worth it when the money spigot gets turned off in the next year or two as AI companies are faced with the financial reality of the expensive operations involved with their rolling coal product, and have to start cutting costs.
What the C-suite has failed to understand is that on the street, nobody and I mean nobody, wants this tulip craze called "AI".
The only people who want hallucinating LLMs masquerading as AI are executives and the marketers who sell to them.
We in the creator community have had our life's work stolen, ingested and spat out as slop by these companies.
For a beloved tool of creators to blithely announce that they're bringing the assault to our desktops and isn't that great, is maddeningly obtuse and an incredible misread of your audience.
These companies are responsible for the theft of every written word and every published art in human history.
They use that theft to create child porn, targeting systems to kill children, and create a cattle pen of surveillance around everyone, and you want to invite them in to our workflow?
Yeah, that's a no from me, dawg.
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Make sure to check out the full message on https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/ and the funding policy at https://fund.blender.org/funding-policy/ to get the complete picture.
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Make sure to check out the full message on https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/ and the funding policy at https://fund.blender.org/funding-policy/ to get the complete picture.
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@janantos Anthropic is not buying anything, and there are no expectations attached to this. We have been putting a lot of effort in reporting development activities in our annual reports: https://www.blender.org/about/foundation/ - i hope this helps.
@fsiddi absolutely, thanks for your transparent reply, tbh I don’t understand the scream of some part of community. I understand there is some affection against AI and I to some degree understand why, but extreme edges of both parties (pro and anti) are making harm. Nothings black&white.
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All right, Francesco here - CEO at Blender. I'm going to spend some time to try and respond. If you have direct questions or comments, reply here!
@fsiddi If you, as the Blender foundation, stand against Anthropic and send that money back, you will be the hero project artists need right now.
Artists are your users for heavens sake. Support them! Fight for their rights! Stand against a company which is actively trying to replace them!
You have a huge opportunity here to do good, in the most public way possible. If you tell Anthropic to take the money back, you will be all over the news and trust me, not in a bad way.
