After the recent acquisition of Thingiverse by MyMiniFactory, Thingiverse became a SoulCrafted company. But what exactly does that mean?
What does SoulCrafted mean?
SoulCrafted is an initiative that was originally started by MyMiniFactory to help digital artists preserve their soul-led creativity. The SoulCrafted movement seeks to protect and empower creators by introducing the concept of a digital label that creators can use to declare that their content originates from human creativity and spirit, not machines. It challenges people to dare to be human. To have the courage to free themselves from the aspects of AI that are destructive to creativity.
By doing so, we hope to create a positive system that allows creators to differentiate their work, resonate with audiences, and potentially capture higher value to support their livelihood in a sustainable way. As well as Thingiverse and MyMiniFactory, the SoulCrafted movement also includes the upcoming SoulCrafted slicer, which aims to provide a powerful open-source slicer without any AI generation or training built in. And it was also crowdfunded by the 3D printing community! You can find out more about how the SoulCrafted initiative works here!
Even in the short time since the acquisition, we have already tried to live up to these values by reducing the prevalence of AI-generated Things on Thingiverse. We have also renewed our focus on challenges, offering a way for designers to showcase their designs and a chance to win prizes while doing so. And we also hired a community manager to talk directly to designers and to find ways to better highlight their work. And we have even more improvements planned for the future!
Let us know what you think!
We want to hear from you! What do you think of the SoulCrafted initiative? Do you have any suggestions on how we can better reflect its values on Thingiverse? Have the changes we’ve made so far helped? Let us know!
About AI content i’d like a few precisions: Are you going to rely completely on the declaration of the uploader about whether AI was used for generation or not? I personally tend to think its best to do so, but its not fully reliable. Are you planning some kind of report system for AI models that are not uploaded as such?
Also what is the status of photogrammetry models? I personally find those quite valuable in many cases and i don’t want them to disappear but i don’t think they quite fit the “SoulCrafted” category either. Maybe it would be nice to have a tag or a category for those?
No AI whatsoever! If we continue using AI like this, it will altogether replace us sooner or later. It’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s not propaganda, it’s the hard truth. AI is already leading to absurd amounts of job loss. If Thingiverse allows there to be AI content all over there website, soon AI will replace them! To Thingiverse, this website will die if it just becomes a big collection of AI slop, and if you allow AI to be used without restrictions for Thingiverse, there will be no initial consequences for using AI, so most will end up using it, and Thingiverse will become another Facebook. Save Thingiverse, save the livelihood of 3d designers, save creativity, ban AI!
While I typically design everything I do from scratch. I have dabbled with AI in the last year and I don’t really see an issue with it (in moderation). I have an engineering background and frankly can’t do the kind of figure model design someone might do in blender. I don’t have to share those things here and I doubt many people even care about what I’ve made enough to download most of them.
What if an AI image was used to inspire a 3d model of it? Is that still AI? Does it still get banned? Just curious where the line is and how it will be enforced.
Agreed. I do not do any Blender work or similar, all of my files are OpenSCAD which is writing code to produce an object. So if I get AI help for a particularly weird code loop, is that now AI generated and not allowed?
A perfect example of that is a modular gaming system I am working on right now. You print a grid, lay it out however you want, and then you can print objects to go in that grid. Some of those objects have brick or stone patterns, and you can select which pattern you want. The Herringbone gave me fits so I ran it through Google Gemini and even that took a while to get it right. I think the AI needed 5 or 6 iterations before it was correct and I was not that far off to begin with.
Is that now “AI generated” even though 98% of the code is mine?
This is a screenshot of the options you can select and you can see how complex it is just from the number of options.
This is such an fascinating topic and I could talk about it for house (feel free to msg me ) but to answer some of the questions directly:
Yes, we rely on uploader declarations, backed by a report system. If a model is flagged as undisclosed AI, we review it - we also do our best to review all designs submitted but the scale uploads means this process isn’t perfect.
The gray area around AI-assisted workflows (code help, reference images, etc.) is real and we’re not going to pretend it’s simple. Our line: if a human designed it, it belongs here. If a model was generated wholesale by a prompt, it doesn’t. We’ll keep refining that boundary with your input.
I agree that something created solely by AI is not something I would like to see here. I see AI as a tool. I also use CAD programs, slicers, calculators and at one time slide rules. I use those tools to help me make my ideas real. I believe that if you use AI as a tool to assist you to create your idea(s) then it would be OK. The difficult part is figuring out where the line is crossed between you doing it with the help of AI or AI doing it with minimal input from you.
I use AI to help me solve programming problems. It saves me having to research programming concepts on the web or looking up information in wooden books. Does that mean my stuff is AI generated. Whether I used AI or not I would still be relying on the knowledge of others to help me solve a problem. Often the help is a quick fix (a piece of simple code or a syntax correction) but often I spend time fighting with the AI as it keeps leading me down the same (wrong) path. I have to figure out the way to redirect my AI research assistant to actually move in the direction I want, rather than just pulling ideas from a lot of other sources that don’t work.
In my opinion AI should be used as a tool to help us do what needs to be done. It should not be doing it for us so that we really don’t understand what we are doing, why we are doing it or how we are doing it.
That’s cool if you want to “save time”. I want to see REAL art work. Not soul less slop created by some robot that anyone can ask a program to do. It’s not creative in any way and is often marketed as such.
Everyone says “AI is a tool”. Well, that tool is going to do an lot of economic damage. I don’t see it making life better in the end when all accounts are settled. I see it making it very hard at minimum. This is a lot more than just simple automation.
) but to answer some of the questions directly: