Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor.
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In the communications it appear that the Blender project were aware that this would be controversial.
First, as the CEO of Blender why do you value the blood money from Anthropic more than the trust and goodwill of your users and individual supporters?
Secondly, as the CEO of Blender do you and the Blender project care about ethics and if so how is that consistent with taking blood money from Anthropic with their well documented practices?
@dahnielson I very much care about users and individual supporters.
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@Blender It's not the announcement, that's tone-deaf. It's the actual acceptance of dirty money by a bad actor that's tone-deaf.
Just in case you forgot: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y4jpg922qo
They paid $1.5bn because they were IRREFUTABLY CAUGHT PIRATING.
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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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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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Note: partially reworded the social media announcement so it sounds less tone-deaf about the controversial nature of the membership.
- Anthropic is a military contractor, and has been used in active military operations by Trump's Dept. of War
- Anthropic shredded millions of books! (after they'd scanned them for their own use)
- Anthropic hoovers up tons of resources, at a moment when the climate crisis looms larger than ever, and simultaneously pushes this idea that we can just throw technology at problems and they'll dissipate
- Anthropic's products are built on the destruction of the commons; stealing people's work, and then inserting themselves as new middlemen after
- Anthropic and companies like it are therefore an especially big fuck-you to anyone who has ever shared anything back with the commons - software obviously, but also music, art, writing, etc
- Anthropic is aggressively scraping everything, disrespecting robots.txt, threatening the existence of the DIY / smol / artisanal / human-made Web (and has already done great damage to it)
- Anthropic's business model is copied from OpenAI, and therefore consists of getting everyone all riled up about the inevitability of an "AI" future. This is based on ideologies in the TESCREAL bundle, which, to put it briefly, is, at its worst, an insane death cult
- Anthropic's products make people generally more dependent, more disempowered, more gullible, more distracted, and less resilient
- Anthropic, by its very existence, reinforces this notion that whenever a big (US) tech company comes along, they can just do what they want with the world, doesn't matter who or what they trample in their path
Blender is not obliged to go along with the Anthropics of the world, just because they have money! Taking a stance is an option too!
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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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@amosmulder the idea is that we welcome funding towards the project, under Blender's condition. This usually has the support of the community. This case of funding is clearly extremely polarizing.
@fsiddi Thanks for the reply. Although I'm no fan of big corporations on the development fund, I get that you need funding and maybe can't be too discerning. But you make it sound like it is not a consideration AT ALL where the money is coming from?
To me (and apparently a lot of the community) this feels like a middle finger, because anthropic is polar opposite to everything I stand for as a creative (and human) and now Blender is helping them whitewash by selling them a spot on their fund.
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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/
@Blender@mastodon.social you can't see it on mastodon instances because mastodon just assumes any reaction as a "favorite", but i see lots of wrench reactions for this post. they look like this:
and they're there for a reason. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wrench_react
i'll put another one so you can familiarize yourself with it: -
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@mastodon.social this will not blend, I'm afraid
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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. -
@Blender Nobody has been under a big enough rock to not know how their userbase would react to such an awful decision.
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@the_wub @ell1e Yes, thanks for asking. The problem with hard forks is that actually developing a software, let alone one at this scale, is much more involved than what small teams like the one of Bforartists can do. Though, I do not share their stance on how they seem to approach their project.
The successful hard forks tend to be the ones where a significant number of original developers switch to the new project. We probably have to see how Blender's devs/contributors react here.
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@fsiddi Thanks for the reply. Although I'm no fan of big corporations on the development fund, I get that you need funding and maybe can't be too discerning. But you make it sound like it is not a consideration AT ALL where the money is coming from?
To me (and apparently a lot of the community) this feels like a middle finger, because anthropic is polar opposite to everything I stand for as a creative (and human) and now Blender is helping them whitewash by selling them a spot on their fund.
@amosmulder We do consider where the money is coming from. In this case it looks like there was not enough consideration.
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@Blender you guys... I have been financially supporting you for like 15 years, and I help run the SLC Blender User Group to promote free and open tools for everyone. Reading this breaks my heart. As an artist who's art has been stolen by this plagiarism machine, and as a coder who's code has been stolen by this plagiarism machine, this feels like a pretty hard slap in the face. Your community doesn't want you taking dirty money like this from unethical tech bros. Please reconsider.
