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
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”)
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.
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.
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.
The idea of being anti-AI for art or game design vs pro-AI for software or websites is interesting because it presumably reflects the fact that those people value art and game design more than they do software or websites. Their view of AI is as a means to an end for stuff that's necessary but low value to them while preserving the human touch for stuff that matters more.
This actually doesn't seem that unreasonable or inconsistent with how most people treat technology or similar conveniences. Many if not most people value a human component for things they think are important, even if it costs more or has other tradeoffs.
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.
they don't want to use AI cuz they don't want anyone else using AI on their shit.
GW is publicly traded company that aggressively chases copyright issues and 3rd party 3d-printed minis, and it's hard to make that stick if you're also using the same stuff.
protecting your art means protecting the art of everyone, and in that sense is the goal. if/when it becomes more profitable not to then I'd imagine GW changes tack immediately...
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.
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 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.
there is 30 years of existing GW art and design that a bot could repackage and regurgitate for the next decade.
they need artists to develop new things, and that means protecting the art
also means they can fight to have it excluded from AI bots and control their copyright & trademarks -- GW is notorious for chasing folks, renaming things to be more copyrightable, etc.
In a perfect world, AI would be used to reduce the amount of work humans must do, to free up their time to make more art. Not used to replace human expression with soulless slop generated from art stolen from other artists.
That's why there's less backlash against AI that writes code and more backlash when the video game industry uses it for creative assets.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 47.3 ms ] threadSeems like a missed bit of PR for their community
> 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.
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.
This actually doesn't seem that unreasonable or inconsistent with how most people treat technology or similar conveniences. Many if not most people value a human component for things they think are important, even if it costs more or has other tradeoffs.
Throwing AI in with crypto/NFTs from a pure utility perspective is an odd take.
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.
they don't want to use AI cuz they don't want anyone else using AI on their shit.
GW is publicly traded company that aggressively chases copyright issues and 3rd party 3d-printed minis, and it's hard to make that stick if you're also using the same stuff.
protecting your art means protecting the art of everyone, and in that sense is the goal. if/when it becomes more profitable not to then I'd imagine GW changes tack immediately...
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.
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.
they need artists to develop new things, and that means protecting the art
also means they can fight to have it excluded from AI bots and control their copyright & trademarks -- GW is notorious for chasing folks, renaming things to be more copyrightable, etc.
That's why there's less backlash against AI that writes code and more backlash when the video game industry uses it for creative assets.