alt Hacker NewsI don't really get the backlash about Blender here, this isn't generative art, it's basically a natural language means of scripting blender.
This feels like the proper way to have AI act as a tool to make artist's jobs easier without taking away their creativity?
Edit: I guess they might want absolutely no AI of any sort in their tools (which seems like a strange line to draw), or is it about the data it's been trained on?
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Regardless of the purported upside, many people in the arts feel betrayed by the commercial interests that built this technology on their work without their consent and threatened by the explicit intent of these vendors to devalue their work by saturating the art and design market with cheap automated substitution.
A lot of artists who would love to be able to direct their professional software in natural language have to reconcile that with how this technology came to be and what the aims are of the company now delivering it to them.
The funny thing is that Allegorithmic (now part of Adobe) was far more devastating to certain classes of game artist than stuff like this will be in its current form.
It almost totally automated vast swaths of texture generation by creating algorithmic systems that technical artists could use to create textures.
Want a brick texture? Sure, you connect some nodes and set parameters and you have great looking bricks. Want the mortar to be a little more widely spaced? Done. Want some moss on the brick? Want some chipping on the brick? Want some color variation? Done, done, done.
It probably reduced the amount of time to iterate textures by more than 100x.
Now, talented technical artists make OK money because they are good at using these tools. Photoshop jockies are gone.
LLM manipulation of Blender will be interesting but it's very, very challenging to see the path of something like Claude having nearly as big of an impact. It'll be helpful to automate some common tasks, to build internal tooling. But Allegorithmic single handedly changed the way 3D games look, because you could be so much more ambitious.
You didn't really hear about it, though, because it wasn't part of the cultural zeitgeist.
People who built a career on their mastery of Blender are going to lose their livelihoods. Why is this difficult to understand?
People are guzzling the amygdala control juice these days
It's not artist replacement yet because they dont have the necessary training or sophistication.
I doubt the current state shows the end of their ambitions.
There is no acceptable use of AI for most people in the artistic field. They see it as an extreme treason, and I understand. They're under incredible incredible threat.
They are conscious of preventing momentum in a bad direction.
If they don't fight it hyper hard, a huge fraction of them will be out of a job instantly.
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It's really clear that businesses are hoping to replace people with AI. In an industry that is already very difficult to make a stable living in, and troubled with regular plagiarism, is it really that surprising that any encroachment of AI into that space would be met with backlash?
Even if you can see how individual circumstances could be beneficial to your workflow, it's a general direction I think many take issue with quite fairly.