Comment by simonw

> 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?

But what's the plan, then? Prevent any third party from downloading Blender and integrate it in any way with an agent?

Businesses have already replaced several background artists gambling on the uncopyrightable status of "AI" output being ignored. In a comercial setting, one can't sell what they never owned in the first place.

Without a constant stream of stolen training data, the "AI" piracy bleed-through and isomorphic plagiarism business model is unsustainable.

We look forward to liquidating the GPU data-centers at a heavy discount. =3

I spent most of my career in the open source world and doesn’t bother me models are trained on my output. Should I feel differently? It seems there’s a kind of ego or emotional attachment to the output that is more common among artists than devs? Perhaps abundance vs scarcity mindsets?

Speaking as someone who works in the industry, I haven't really heard this sentiment. Artists are predominantly hostile to diffusion models, but optimistic about LLMs and their ability to help them write tools and scripts even if they're non-technical.

Yeah, I can understand being upset with their work being stolen to train these models. Anthropic doesn't seem to be working on image/video generation, but they are still training on text-based creative works of questionable sourcing.

Makes me think that there's some room in the model lineup for one that doesn't do as well on benchmarks, but is trained on "ethically sourced" data (though they'd need to somehow prove that they aren't "accidentally" including other data).

> Why is this difficult to understand?

It'll be way easier to understand for developers when it starts happening in earnest to our profession, which is coming soon.

It already is here to some extent, but so far mostly on the junior end so it hasn't been impacting many people who are already established in an industry that has provided relatively easy stable livelihoods for the past 30+ years, but soon won't.

I am a huge beneficiary of agentic dev tools. They completely changed my life and my income. However, I totally get the general anti-AI sentiment. The ultra-bear case is that it somehow kills all of us, the bull case is that those who own the inference get the all the spoils.

Even myself, while I am currently extremely empowered by these tools... I could see my role (Founder/PM/builder) disappearing in the next couple years.

I respect you a lot, so if you have a moment, I would really like to get talked down from my take.

Say that again in five years when you can't find a job except mega yatch toilet cleaner because Claude is distinguished engineer level for one millionth of your cost and thousands of times faster, and can be instantly parallelized in the tens or hundreds of thousands just to be spun down arbitrarily as needed at any time

That's a strange position to take. I can understand not wanting models that have been trained on questionably sourced data, but otherwise they're opposing essentially a UX change, not based on UX concerns but on ideological fears.

Given how much software and other AI/computer vision improvements 3D content often relies on, it's weird to decide that the algorithm itself is unallowable.

This is the best phrasing of the issue I've seen online anywhere.

You can find AI useful and still be against its introduction into your field for entirely understandable reasons.

Unfortunately this does create uphill friction for any good-intentioned people trying to use AI to improve art by empowering people to take on more ambitious projects. (This is a general statement and not related to the case of Anthropic. Of course Anthropic here is just trying to sell their product, which is a fair thing to do in isolation, but I also understand the opposition to it on the grounds of its downstream effects.)

Completely false and I hate this puritan gatekeeping. Artists who hate AI are the type to put more importance on the craft than the end product itself. Art is a means of communicating something personal. It’s not meant to show off skills in how well you can move a pencil or how many fricking tools you know in adobe.

AI removes all these hurdles and directly presents you with the end problem - communication. Artists hate that because most artists don’t have anything to communicate. These people deserve to be automated away. I don’t wanna see more derivative shit. Artists who have something special to communicate won’t feel threatened by AI but feel more freedom.