UIBuzz - Software and game development

 What's up everybody? Welcome to the episode of the UIBUS Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Witham. You can find me and this podcast at PeterWitham.com. So I'm gonna talk a little bit here about the recent announcement that Anthropic will be supporting Blender and some of the controversy that comes with that and just a little bit of my take on it.

So fill in some blanks here in case you don't know. Anthropic is one of those well-known AI companies that has Claude, for example, and Claude Code. I'm sure you've probably heard of it. And Blender is a 3D modeling program, Blender.org. It's actually a fantastic 3D modeling program that is community supported and has corporate sponsorships and a few other things like that.

And that's what we're talking about here. It was recently announced that Anthropic would be a Patron member. Now what that means, there were different levels, but essentially what that means is they would be providing 240,000 euros to support Blender. Now, this has changed a little bit because there's some backlash from the community, and I'll go into the, a little bit here.

But basically, they're gonna be dumping a whole bunch of money into Blender to help support it, like a lot of other places do, which, hey, is a great thing in my opinion. Now, of course, the controversy came okay, what does this mean? Is this gonna be AI coming into Blender? And all of those kind of things that naturally come along with this.

So Blender came back and they said, "No they're just gonna be supporting us with a financial benefit here." Now, there was no suggestion anywhere as far as I can tell that, there was any conditions attached to this, right? It's not "Hey, we'll give you a bunch of money and you're gonna incorporate our AI tools and things like that.

There was none of that. That was just one of those immediate concerns from the communities which, again, is completely understandable, but on paper at least there was no signs of that happening. And that's kind of part of what bothers me a little bit about this is there's an assumption anytime a company helps to support something like Blender, one of these foundations that's community supported, that they're looking to get something out of it or influence the way the direction forward for those tools and all of those kind of things.

Now, yes, of course that certainly does happen, but in this case, there was no indication of that. I use Blender and I use Anthropic's Claude Code. In no way does that influence my opinions and thoughts on this, but I do use them both and I have no problem with that. But I take an issue when people start insinuating that there are these links that just don't exist, right?

It's fair enough to raise the question, but to make out that there is this link here that doesn't exist, it's a different thing entirely. Now, this caused Blender to come back and say, "Okay, let us clarify our position a little bit here." First of all, they apologized to the community, which personally, I don't think they have to.

I think it's great that they did, but I don't think that they have to. They've not done anything wrong here. There's nothing to apologize for, right? But they do say, "Okay, going forward, we would seek more conversation and perspectives from contributors and things like that before making these decisions."

That's fantastic. That's great.

But I don't think that they necessarily have to, but kudos to them for saying that they'll have more conversations about these things going forward. Now, they've also said that they, and they've spoken with Anthropic and they're gonna change the way this is gonna work. Now, originally Anthropic was gonna be, like I say, a Patreon, what they call a corporate Patron member.

Instead, they've now changed this to, it's gonna be a one-time payment. So it's gonna be a money dump in there in one go as opposed to being a supporting member over time, which, you know, okay fine. I don't think, honestly, it makes that much difference in, at least in my opinion.

And again, I don't think anyone's doing anything wrong here, but does go on to comment about generative AI technologies and how that would be used in their products, and currently, at least in my understanding, there is nothing built in to Blender as such for those kind of AI technologies.

Now that said, of course, Blender is well known for having an absolutely fantastic community of plugins and add-ons and all of those kind of things, but at the end of the day, you can't really hold Blender responsible for what third parties desire to make. So if someone decides to make an AI tool that works with Blender hey don't shoot Blender for that, right?

If you've got an issue with it don't use it, but they're not the one making it, it's the third party. So I think that's still a good place for it to be. I think that there is inevitably gonna be, if there isn't already, some AI tools for Blender that will be third party. For example you could use a AI tool like, let's just say Claude Code from Anthropic.

You could use that to generate a Python script that you could then run inside Blender to generate whatever it may be, some assets, some animations, what, whatever it may be. But at that point, you could argue, "Okay, you've now used AI tools to generate Blender content." But again, that's not Blender directly, that's just by way of a third party usage there.

So anyway, I just wanted to put that out there this week. I still don't think there's anything wrong with this. Kudos to Blender for addressing this though and being very transparent about it, but, I think a little bit of community patience and understanding is also involved, needs to be involved here because at the end of the day, Blender needs to be financially supported to keep existing in one form or another, right?

I've certainly donated money to Blender in the past, of course, nowhere near the level of, what we're talking about here on this one and these corporate donations, but I think that it's good that tools like Blender get these kind of donations to help support the folks that are working on it so that they can keep making better products and do the things that they love.

If you've got thoughts on that, hey, you know what, reach out to me, PeterWitham.com. Love to hear about them, but again, little bit of a turnaround here, but I still think it's a good outcome in the end, and I will speak to you in the next episode.