When the Teacher Stops Protecting the Craft
Price's pivot matters structurally because educators occupy a specific role in creative communities — they are trusted not just to transmit technique but to model values about what the craft is for. When a figure at that level publicly embraces AI tools, it does not register as one practitioner's preference; it reads as an institutional signal about which direction the field is heading. The r/ArtistHate post naming him was not a technical critique — it was a community processing what it means when its teachers stop being its advocates.
The Blender Foundation's decision to accept Anthropic as a Corporate Patron, and then to amend donation parameters under community pressure, shows how quickly institutional choices become community crises when the underlying trust is already strained. Price's tutorial and Anthropic's connector announcement landed in the same week — the community had no separation between the two events, and the compressed timeline made the institutional and personal grievances feel like a coordinated move rather than coincidence.