Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor.
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@art_codesmith This is currently a one-time donation.
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Note: partially reworded the social media announcement so it sounds less tone-deaf about the controversial nature of the membership.
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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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Note: partially reworded the social media announcement so it sounds less tone-deaf about the controversial nature of the membership.
@Blender Guys, it's not the wording, it's the action itself. And the problem is less whether you'll still be independent, and more that you're whitewashing an evildoer. Think the Museum of Tolerance would accept a no-strings donation from white separatists?
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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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@fsiddi that the blood money is ‘a donation’ is not the ethical panacea you seem to think it is.
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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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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 The complete picture? Are you on crack?
This is not the complete picture until you factor in anthropic's current and past associations and actions
It's blood money you are taking, nothing you do will make it clean or good. No matter what direct influence anthropic has on the company or product, the company is now aligned with all of anthropic's ideals and crimes
by taking this money you have openly declared that you believe ecocide is fine, genocide is fine, fascist slopaganda is fine
if you want us to believe this complete picture nonsense at least say what it is, bonuses all round in return for white and green washing an LLM company at the expense of the community on which your company is founded
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@JoshuaACNewman @Blender Google and Meta are among the biggest drivers of AI in the world. They are no less bad than Anthropic.
If you draw the line at "Blender should never take donations from ANY company I disagree with" that line was crossed long long ago. They've also taken money from Microsoft and web 3 companies.
If they turned up their noses at corporate donations the way you're asking they would have basically no funding.
@ninjadodo @JoshuaACNewman @Blender probably people aren’t talking about blender’s funding from meta, google and microsoft because we aren’t in a thread about their funding from microsoft, meta or google, we’re in a thread about their funding from anthropic.
this is just whataboutism. it doesn’t refute or mitigate the criticisms people are making. it’s just an arbitrary demand that every historical bad decision by blender be addressed simultaneously with the current criticism
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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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1) Thinking about that
2) This has never really come up before
3) Lots of internal discussion and feedback gathering, but probably not enough
4) There are no strings attached or influence here. It's just money.@fsiddi @cczona i think if money did not equal influence you wouldnt be seeing this reaction in your supporters. its clearly influencing something. inducing this huge upheaval in your support base means proportionally more users supporters and contributors that are pro ai. the conclusions arent hard to reach.
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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!
@fsiddi I think enough people have said enough things, but that will probably continue. Please take care of yourself and the team. Sometimes, it is literally that, a mistake. These are tough times for creative people, and many in the community do look up to Blender. They're understandably angry about this. To my fellow artists, we should remember there are humans on the other side of this, and as humans, try to give them a second chance.
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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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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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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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I appreciate you opening your feed to this discussion. I suppose my central concern is that in an open-source project such as Blender, the community aspect is vital, as that's after all where the work is done. Blender's community, who have worked on this for so long, are a melange of extraordinary artists and programming savants -- neither of whom are in the same moral alignment as groups such as Anthropic, who make a point of seeking to replace artists, writers, and coders.
While I understand that your funding policy specifically states that those providing money to the project will not influence its roadmap, and I certainly expect that this is your intention, unfortunately, the open source community have been burned on a wide variety of circumstances much like this one, where the alignment of a project shifts to the people waving money. The intrinsic way in which this happens is for the project leaders themselves to be influenced by the funding, and I will assume that you're on guard against that; one extrinsic way is that members of the community who are against this source of funding will themselves leave, causing a gap in progress which may well be filled with bad actors and those who are more aligned with the funders' goals.
At the moment I can see no viable means by which to thread the needle: Blender is on a precipice, in which either the money is refused and the community tentatively rejoins, on guard for another such effort, or in which Blender take the money and the community fracture, as we've seen in numerous FOSS projects.
Make no mistake, I and many others see this as an outright betrayal, especially with Anthropic's efforts to use Blender for its own, if you'll pardon my language, sewage system of generated content. I would simply like to know: will the project continue with the community built over the last two decades, or will it discard them in favour of a corporate attachment which, even in the absence of direct malice, will cause untold harms?
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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/
