After quite a lot of backlash following the Blender announcement that Anthropic would become a Corporate Sponsor, the Blender Foundation released a statement.
I care less about the generative AI being built into blender, than all of everybody’s creative work in blender getting siphoned to Amodei, which I don’t see them backing off of (the thing about adding extra API calls Anthropic wanted isn’t addressed here, only the branding of the donation).
If a man’s paying your rent he is gonna feel entitled to something, whether you call him your boyfriend or not.
Blender showed who they are, they should not be trusted until there are role changes.
From Blender’s post:
After an in-depth discussion with the team and several community contributors, we have decided to receive the funds as a singular donation instead of a Development Fund membership, similar to how other open source organizations have handled such contributions. Anthropic has been informed and supports this decision.
To use your metaphor, it sounds like they took the money as one-time gift instead of ongoing rent payments.
As far as generative AI:
Most importantly, we 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. Discussions will happen in the public blender.org channels, based on drafts by the Blender team.
Blender is a tool for artists and creators, it’s made by humans for humans. No generative AI functionality is currently available or planned to be integrated in Blender.
I acknowledge that we are reading their press release with different amounts of charity, and that if you view them as communicating in good faith, your interpretation is reasonable.
I will note that on Mastodon they said they had changed their post to improve the optics to the community. This is also a reframe for optics.
They didn’t say they weren’t going to harvest your actions to train generative AI, they only said they’re not putting the generative tools in the app for the users.
Like I said, they’re taking the money, they’re still buddies with Anthropic, they say this was personally negotiated.
Look at how Harvard interacted with Jeffrey Epstein, same playbook here. Just cause the president of the university was flying on Epstein’s plane and honeymooning on his island doesn’t mean he had influence over Harvard! He wasn’t on the board of trustees!
Blender harvesting data to train gen AI would blow up in their faces so badly Anthropic would have had to donate a lot of money to make it worthwhile. And have you looked at the list of Development Fund members? Meta, Google and Adobe are already on there. I’m not sure that taking money from one more company that would be interested in that data really tips the scales.
When Ton announced he‘s stepping down last year I was worried. I‘m willing to label this as a one time slip up but it really doesn‘t help dispelling my worries at all.