Games Workshop bans staff from using AI

Don't underestimate how anti-AI the tabletop community is. This could have been entitled: "Games Workshop elects not to experience multi-year headache. Will use AI when profitable."

I don't do much with crypto/NFTs/AI, because I don't find any of it useful yet. But I get so much "with us or against us" heat for not being zealously against the the idea of them. It was NFTs, NFTs, NFTs at the table for months until it became AI, AI, AI. My preference is to talk about something else while playing board games.

One thing I've found when talking to non-technical board gamers about AI is that while they’re 100% against using AI to generate art or game design, when you ask them about using AI tools to build software or websites the response is almost always something like "Programmers are expensive, I can't afford that. If I can use AI to cut programmers out of the process I'm going to do it."

A minority are conflicted about this position.

When I talk to technical people at game nights we almost never talk about tech. The one time our programmers all played RoboRally the night kind of died because it felt too close to work for a Saturday night.

If GW was going to use AI they would probably start with sprue layouts. Maybe the AI could number the bits in sane way? I would be for that.

I was in management i probably also wouldn’t like my designers to use AI. I pay them good money to draw original pieces and everyone can tell and it looks generic when AI is used. I’d want my moneys worth

At the same time, the 3D printing community is very much embracing AI as a means to circumvent price-gouging behavior by GW in particular. The popular STL slicer Lychee just recently added a generator tool at https://3dgen.lychee.co/ that has seen both massive protests from hobby community idealists and, as it's still around, likely a lot of adoption by the less vocal pragmatists.

We'll have to see how this plays out. Games Workshop is (supposedly) notoriously litigous, and they've gone after artists who get too close to their art style. AI models are trained on that, so this is going to be an interesting thing to monitor.

I believe the lore appropriate term is Abominable Intelligences.

Good for them, it's nice to see some management that hasn't totally bought into this "no workers, only subscription AI bots" vision of the future that so many tech CEOs are selling.

Personally I would never pay for tabletop miniatures or lore books generated by AI. It's the same core problem as publishing regurgitated LLM crap in a book or using ChatGPT to write an email - I'm not going to spend my precious time reading something that the author didn't spend time to write.

I am perfectly capable of asking a model to generate a miniature, or a story, or a dumb comment for reddit. I have no desire to pay a premium for someone else to do it and get no value from the generated content - the only original part is the prompt so if you try to sell AI generated "content" you might as well just sell the prompt instead.

I seee companies making statements like these (LArian and others) that must be afraid of the reaction from their customers if they decided they would use AI will eventually come to regret it. There will be other companies that do what they do better and faster because they leverage AI as part of the process, and I believe very soon the backlash against AI will disappear as people begin using products with AI that are really very good and they will jsuit stop caring / forget they had an issue with it in the first place as they watch their friends and others who dont care enjoying themselves regardless.

Very funny for this to come from the Warhammer studio, specifically

If they did use AI and still charged as much as they do for a sprue of models people would definitely be upset.

AI generated anything is seen as cheap. It is cheap. It generates “similar” reproductions from its training set. It’s called, “slop,” for a reason: low effort, low quality.

There have been quality issues in some of GW’s recent product lines, but for the most part they still have fans because the bar is already high for what they make.

Cutting costs to make an extra bunch by making the product crappier would be a kick to the knee. Fans already pay a premium for their products.

Good on them for not going down that road.

I kind of wonder about game assets created by AI and if they are copyrightable.

GW has put an immense amount of effort over time into reworking all their previously more generic marketing and lore elements into being more distinctly copyrightable and trademarkable. They're not going to let possible future lawsuits over LLM training data and the like screw that up.

Their finance guys will use it to determine how to price three sprues of abs plastic for the most they possibly can though!

Lore accurate

I’m surprised they didn’t take the opportunity to lean into their existing properties which in universe treat AI as an abomination(the in universe phrase AI stands for “abominable intelligence”)

Seems like a missed bit of PR for their community

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WFH vs in-office, AI mandatory vs AI forbidden: ideally I want my boss to let me work however I want, and ideally+realistically however makes me most productive.

> in Its Content or Designs

Personally: I'm a developer, so my situation is different. But right now I use AI code completion and Claude Code. I think I'd be fine without Claude Code, since it hasn't "clicked" for me yet; I think it's motivating, particularly for new features and boilerplate, but often (even with the boilerplate) must rewrite a lot of what it generates. Code completion would be harder, but maybe if the work was interesting and non-boilerplate enough I'd manage.

I've heard Claude Code has improved a lot very recently, so I would feel left behind without it completely, except I can use it in my spare time on personal projects. But if it keeps improving and/or ends up "clicking", then I may feel like I'm spinning my wheels at work.