After quite a lot of backlash following the Blender announcement that Anthropic would become a Corporate Sponsor, the Blender Foundation released a statement.
Glad they responded so dynamically to Blender users but I really think programmers and tech people need to take a giant step back and look at how they appear when they blindly endorse AI hype.
I think the nature of bubbles like this is “experts” become convinced of something that exists in their field that every day normal people can see is utter bullshit and how bad/destructively the resulting bubble pops depends on how humble and willing the “experts” are to coming around to what everybody else already concluded about the thing they were “experts” about. In this case given the smug hubris of techbros, the bubble is going to pop about as violently as possible…
I speculate that a big reason for this hubris is tech/computer minded people tend to focus on practical problems and solutions and will reflexively “lean in” to examine something confusing or unknown closer and closer until they get it, discarding vague grey areas until a binary, automatable reality emerges.
To people who think like this, thank you for existing and solving so many problems but you must recognize this type of thinking is systematically vulnerable to bullshitting since bullshit pulls its power from a periphery integrated in a fantastical way rather than a lie about the heart of something being different than it is.
In other words in my opinion “tech people” will tend to look for bullshit in the mechanisms, not the people, not the incentives, not the overall motion of the collective sum of individuals “innocently” optimizing their own corner of a wholistically nonsensical, hurtful enterprise. A programmer says “get rid of the fluff, what is it precisely, in a step by step fashion we are trying to do?”. Thank goodness programmers do ask and answers questions in such a fashion for us, but with that kind of thinking comes a blindspot to a massive economic bubble that is hurting and will hurt many more people before it pops and then vastly more people after it pops.
It is not ethical to be connected with scammers and architects of avoidable economic catastrophe and it is not ethical to lend your own credibility as Blender developers to them.
These people should be in jail for lying about what they are selling to a criminal degree. This isn’t even about the specifics of the AI part, rather it is like Blender making a corporate sponsorship with a Subprime Mortgage company right before the 2008 Financial Crash. Not only is the money fake, you don’t want to be associated with the fakeness of those “grand ideas” or they will swallow you whole. Turn around and run away as fast as you can, AI is bullshit and it certainly IS NOT profitable.
The idea Blender would let Anthropic’s name be associated with it is a serious insult to the Blender community.
Glad they responded so dynamically to Blender users but I really think programmers and tech people need to take a giant step back and look at how they appear when they blindly endorse AI hype.
I think the nature of bubbles like this is “experts” become convinced of something that exists in their field that every day normal people can see is utter bullshit and how bad/destructively the resulting bubble pops depends on how humble and willing the “experts” are to coming around to what everybody else already concluded about the thing they were “experts” about. In this case given the smug hubris of techbros, the bubble is going to pop about as violently as possible…
I speculate that a big reason for this hubris is tech/computer minded people tend to focus on practical problems and solutions and will reflexively “lean in” to examine something confusing or unknown closer and closer until they get it, discarding vague grey areas until a binary, automatable reality emerges.
To people who think like this, thank you for existing and solving so many problems but you must recognize this type of thinking is systematically vulnerable to bullshitting since bullshit pulls its power from a periphery integrated in a fantastical way rather than a lie about the heart of something being different than it is.
In other words in my opinion “tech people” will tend to look for bullshit in the mechanisms, not the people, not the incentives, not the overall motion of the collective sum of individuals “innocently” optimizing their own corner of a wholistically nonsensical, hurtful enterprise. A programmer says “get rid of the fluff, what is it precisely, in a step by step fashion we are trying to do?”. Thank goodness programmers do ask and answers questions in such a fashion for us, but with that kind of thinking comes a blindspot to a massive economic bubble that is hurting and will hurt many more people before it pops and then vastly more people after it pops.
It is not ethical to be connected with scammers and architects of avoidable economic catastrophe and it is not ethical to lend your own credibility as Blender developers to them.
These people should be in jail for lying about what they are selling to a criminal degree. This isn’t even about the specifics of the AI part, rather it is like Blender making a corporate sponsorship with a Subprime Mortgage company right before the 2008 Financial Crash. Not only is the money fake, you don’t want to be associated with the fakeness of those “grand ideas” or they will swallow you whole. Turn around and run away as fast as you can, AI is bullshit and it certainly IS NOT profitable.
The idea Blender would let Anthropic’s name be associated with it is a serious insult to the Blender community.