Oh, noes, the horrors of democratising access to an expert tool. What will onshape do now, that the free one is accessible to oom more regular people that could use a 3d shape but don't have the time to learn a very complicated yet powerful tool?
I guess people have said the same about game engines / coding tools that help artists turn their vision into working, compiling games, right? Riiight?
edit: I seem to be rate limited and unable to reply? I'll paste it here:
I'm sorry but I don't agree. People care about art when it is extraordinary, in the same way people watch professional sport because it is extraordinary, or they watch cooking shows because it's extraordinary. What you call "democratisation" I would call the trivialisation of something which used to take effort into something which does not. People don't watch random people who have never played soccer before at the World Cup, they don't watch someone who can barely cook Kraft dinner cook on MasterChef, and they don't go to museums to look at someone's first sketch. There is no reason to assume that the trivialisation of art wouldn't simply devalue the medium to the point of irrelevance. However since people seek what is extraordinary, you will always have gates which are kept, and for good reason.
edit 2, responding to hbosch:
You don't have to be an extraordinary soccer player to enjoy playing soccer, but that doesn't mean we should develop a pill that makes everyone a great soccer player with no skill development or effort required. We don't watch professional sports just to see a ball move fast, we watch to see what a human is capable of through discipline and hard work. If everyone could take a pill to become an elite athlete, the sport wouldn't be democratized, it would be deleted.
When you remove the effort barrier you don't make art easier, you collapse the meaning of striving for excellence. If the 'expert' and the 'novice' produce the same result with the same button press, we haven't empowered the novice, we’ve just made the expertise irrelevant.
Tools like Blender are force multipliers for human intent, generative AI is a replacement for it. If you use Blender to make a "stupid little game," you’ve gained a skill. If you use AI to generate the assets for that game, you haven't gained a skill, you’ve simply acted as a manager for an automated system. The value of that game to the creator isn't just the code, it’s the fact that they built it. I find it really hard to believe that people find value besides the initial novelty in having a computer generate stupid little games - for what purpose? If nobody is going to play it, and you haven't built it, precisely where does the value in it come from? It's like a simulacrum of human creation.
What I actually see is people who are unwilling to put in the effort but seek the rewards anyways. They want the accolades from creation but without the hard work. I dont see the value in enabling this.
Do you believe it's a good thing that all software is becoming noticeably lower quality? Do you believe it's a good thing that open source is on its death bed now that licenses don't mean anything and popular projects are drowning under AI generated PR spam? Even here on HN, Show HN is effectively dead as almost every single submission is some boring garbage generated in 30 minutes that nobody cares about, not even the person who submitted it.
Experts don't need to have a moat built around them, because they build their own moats with their skills and efforts. Just because you get jealous and feel entitled to the fruits of the experts' labor while being unwilling to put in the same work does not mean you have the right to steal their work and mix it up in a computer algorithm so you can later claim it as yours.
The upside? A new generation of content creator who may profit from automation.
We never had problems creating art. In fact, what's artistic is relative to the effort involved in the creation process; also, access to technology available at the time.
To me the argument is valid. It's devaluing the skills of existing artists, and the decade long investment they likely put into their craft.
The truth is, the vast majority of art is not extraordinary, whether it comes from a canvas, a typewriter, Photoshop, or Blender. That is as true for AI as it is for humans. Likewise, the vast majority of people who kick a soccer ball will never be extraordinary soccer players.
I firmly believe that tools which enable people to get closer to their goals are always a good thing. The concept of what makes something "extraordinary" does not come from the maker, or the tool, but from the beholder. It is the audience's job to discern what is and isn't "extraordinary", not the makers'.
Honestly these people are just so weird.
What are you talking about? We should absolutely do this. We should extend this to as many domains of human achievement as possible. By this logic, computers shouldn't have existed because it devalued the skill that scribes and accountants developed before word processors and spreadsheets. Blender itself is a tool that made 3D accessible to thousands of people who previously had to pay for expensive licenses, training, and SGI workstations. Literally the whole point of technology is to make more things possible for people unable to do it naturally or without great effort.
