Blender change the Anthropic AI funding deal, with discussions planned for AI Policies

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Glad they responded so dynamically to Blender users but I really think programmers and tech people need to take a giant step back and look at how they appear when they blindly endorse AI hype.

I think the nature of bubbles like this is “experts” become convinced of something that exists in their field that every day normal people can see is utter bullshit and how bad/destructively the resulting bubble pops depends on how humble and willing the “experts” are to coming around to what everybody else already concluded about the thing they were “experts” about. In this case given the smug hubris of techbros, the bubble is going to pop about as violently as possible….

I speculate that a big reason for this hubris is tech/computer minded people tend to focus on practical problems and solutions and will reflexively “lean in” to examine something confusing or unknown closer and closer until they get it, discarding vague grey areas until a binary, automatable reality emerges.

To people who think like this, thank you for existing and solving so many problems but you must recognize this type of thinking is systematically vulnerable to bullshitting since bullshit pulls its power from a periphery integrated in a fantastical way rather than a lie about the heart of something being different than it is.

In other words in my opinion “tech people” will tend to look for bullshit in the mechanisms, not the people, not the incentives, not the overall motion of the collective sum of individuals “innocently” optimizing their own corner of a wholistically nonsensical, hurtful enterprise. A programmer says “get rid of the fluff, what is it precisely, in a step by step fashion we are trying to do?”. Thank goodness programmers do ask and answers questions in such a fashion for us, but with that kind of thinking comes a blindspot to a massive economic bubble that is hurting and will hurt many more people before it pops and then vastly more people after it pops.

It is not ethical to be connected with scammers and architects of avoidable economic catastrophe and it is not ethical to lend your own credibility as Blender developers to them.

These people should be in jail for lying about what they are selling to a criminal degree. This isn’t even about the specifics of the AI part, rather it is like Blender making a corporate sponsorship with a Subprime Mortgage company right before the 2008 Financial Crash. Not only is the money fake, you don’t want to be associated with the fakeness of those “grand ideas” or they will swallow you whole. Turn around and run away as fast as you can, AI is bullshit and it certainly IS NOT profitable.

The idea Blender would let Anthropic’s name be associated with it is a serious insult to the Blender community.


Comments from other communities

I simply cannot see any good coming from Foundations receiving funds from objectively bad Corporations. Hope I’m wrong.

Wait, the implication here is that there are good corporations?

Touché. You win.

there’s nothing more important than being right on the internet. lol




Sometimes, evil corporations want to use a FLOSS tool for exactly the same things as its other users do, so if they give money to the developers to use to do what the users want, everyone benefits. Other times, evil corporations want to buy some of the good reputation of a FLOSS tool and/or infect it with their toxic reputation as a marketing strategy, and only evil benefits.


I’m more on the side of “never stop an adversary from making a mistake”.

If they give their dirty money but have no control or power over you, take it and use it for your own agenda.


If they have a significant amount of money to donate to a foundation the odds are they’re evil anyway.

Foundations can just not get enough money and collapse, if you want.


Could be worse, and it’s free money.

The cynic (ML?) in me says there’s no free lunch under capitalism.




I am alterIng the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.


I’m totally okay with them receiving money from bad companies. It’s like vandals ordered to pick up highway trash - yo momma - as punishment.

Receiving Merge Requests from sloppers, though? That’s not cool.


Maybe anthropic wants the app better controllable by agents?

Yeah I’m 100% sure they are doing this A) for good PR (blender is a beloved app and funding them is awesome) b) to retain communication with the team for easier agent integration later c) to lobby for their AI.

I can totally understand that it doesn’t look great if blender accepts the money.

I am sure though that blender could probably need the money; open source software is criminally underfunded and those devs need money to survive at the end of the day.



Well… if all the AI companies are making massive losses, might as well take some of their money from them and help them along.


"Like all Blender donations, it will be spent on core activities for the Blender project, supporting human-driven development, art, and creativity”.

And what does Anthropic get in return?

Likely nothing in this case since they aren’t going to be a full sponsor anymore. I believe real full sponsors can have some impact on the direction of feature development but that isn’t bad because it’s open source and adding features large companies want and will pay to have developed in open source tools isn’t bad.

“No generative AI functionality is currently available or planned to be integrated in Blender”



Kinda weird there’s some insistence about open source only getting funding from the purest of sources.


Who fucking wanted this and do we have a replacement?

Did you read the article? Blender isn’t doing AI stuff.

lol, I was confused with the comments also.




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