After quite a lot of backlash following the Blender announcement that Anthropic would become a Corporate Sponsor, the Blender Foundation released a statement from Francesco Siddi, the Chairman of the Blender Foundation.
Siddi explains that Anthropic will no longer become a full sponsor, instead the funding will be given to the Blender Foundation as a plain single donation all at once. So Blender will still receive a funding boost, without Anthropic's name being attached to them in any way it seems. They said that "Anthropic has been informed and supports this decision" noting that "Like all Blender donations, it will be spent on core activities for the Blender project, supporting human-driven development, art, and creativity".
There will be some changes coming after this. Siddi noted the Blender Foundation will be "strengthening the processes when it comes to accepting donations, aligned with the existing Funding Policy". And that they "need to urgently tackle the topic and clearly define how Blender is positioned in regards to generative AI technologies when it comes to the product, software development, documentation, and other activities".
So eventually, they may have some more full formal policies when it comes to AI. Something they probably should have had already, especially before accepting any funding from an AI company. But the statement was clear that "No generative AI functionality is currently available or planned to be integrated in Blender" in case people were at all worried about it.
Hopefully something actually good will come out of all this in the end.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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If this turns out for the better, Mozilla ought to learn a lesson or two from this.
AllyTheProtogen 15 hours ago
Quoting: dpanterbut did they really need quite a lot of backlash to realize the bulging diaper wasn't full of candy? 🤔My guess is that in the beginning, they just thought "Money's money" and didn't really think about the fact that it's dirty money gained through horrific means. Seeing so many people point out how every AI company including Anthropic is completely antithetical to their goals probably made them realise they should change which direction they went with Anthropic.
"Adding policies" almost never makes things better, and short of a policy on how they want contributors to disclose the usage of AI in coding, I'm not sure where it would possibly be relevant. It's open source, so they can't prevent a bot controlling the mouse/running commands to edit a model in Blender anyway!
Kimyrielle 13 hours ago
Quoting: AllyTheProtogenit's dirty money gained through horrific means.Yeah, people really shouldn't take money from organized crime, labor camp operations, sweat shops, or child exploitation.
Oh... wait...
Quoting: Talon1024Good! Glad to see they're prioritizing their users, their reputation, and human creativity over money, and I believe that is of the utmost importance for a major Free/Open Source project like Blender.Sorry to be negative, but with statements like blender now made I always add "for now..." AI is not going away and will become better and slowly more common, 5 years from now there will be no backlash at all, sadly.
If this turns out for the better, Mozilla ought to learn a lesson or two from this.
At this point, "money is money", and Blender could certainly use the boost in that regard. But it's very easy to slip towards justifications like "see? We might be destroying everything, but the money is used in a good cause!". Time will tell.
PlayingOnLinuxphone 6 hours ago
However, it is good that they address the complains in a good way. People who (still) complain do it for an uninformed opinion in this specific case. I am Blender user myself and don't want to get unethical neuronal network tools implemented by default. I am also fine with keeping the door open for implementing such tools in future, if it is done in a fully ethical and transparent free software way.
Hint: ethical and transparent includes:
- All trainings data is public available and published under free licenses as GPL or CC.
- All licenses of trainings data are respected (as naming sources/creators).
- Tools running locally, offline and do not collect any data.
- Tools are not implemented if there is no real benefit (like replacing totally fine tools) and also not to produce art-slop (can be done with plugins anyway).
gradyvuckovic 2 hours ago
I would have thought if the Blender community was happy to accept money from Adobe that they'd be happy to accept money from anyone.
Don't get me wrong, I hate OpenAI and Anthropic with the fiery passion of a thousand stars burning brightly, but sometimes it's hard for me to tell what outrage is just me being me and what outrage is actually universal. Seems this was a universal outrage. It really says something out of all the companies Blender Foundation has taken money from, THIS is the one which people couldn't stomach. Jeez, just shows how absolutely poisonous 'GenAI' is right now in public opinion.
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