[HN Gopher] Games Workshop bans staff from using AI
___________________________________________________________________
Games Workshop bans staff from using AI
Author : jsheard
Score : 178 points
Date : 2026-01-13 20:45 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ign.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ign.com)
| hwers wrote:
| 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
| crooked-v wrote:
| Well, you can definitely make AI art much less obvious with the
| right tweaking (directly running models, blending different
| sub-models, etc). The bigger issues from a professional
| perspective are liability concerns and then, even if you have
| guaranteed licensed sources, the impossibility of controlling
| fine details. For a company like GW it's kind of pointless if
| it can't reflect all the decades worth of odds and ends they've
| built both the game and the surrounding franchise around.
| nomel wrote:
| alternatively, you can use AI as a starting point. All design
| is _iterative_.
| hollowturtle wrote:
| Sure and limit yourself at the starting point, people
| underestimate how much limiting these tools are, they're
| trained a on a fixed set can only reproduce noise from here
| and there
| astrange wrote:
| > they're trained a on a fixed set can only reproduce noise
| from here and there
|
| This anti-AI argument doesn't make sense, it's like saying
| it's impossible to reinvent multiplication based on reading
| a times table. You can create new things via generalization
| or in-context learning (references).
|
| In practice many image generation models aren't that
| powerful, but Gemini's is.
|
| If someone created one that output multi-layer images/PSDs,
| which is certainly doable, it could be much more usable.
| yndoendo wrote:
| If image generation is anything like code generation then
| AI is not good at copying layout / art style of the coder
| / artist.
|
| Using Visual Studio, all the AI code generation is
| applying Microsoft's syntax style and not my syntax
| style. The return code line might be true but the layout
| / art / syntax is completely off. This with a solution
| that has a little less than one million lines of code, at
| the moment, which AI can work off of.
|
| Art is not constant. The artist has a flow and may have
| an idea but the art will change form with each stroke
| with even removing strokes that are not fitting. I see as
| AI generated content lacks emotion from the artist.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Image generation is nothing like AI code generation in
| this regard. Copying artist style is one of the things
| that is explicitly quite easy to do for open-weight
| models. Go to civitai and there are a million LORAs
| trained specifically on recreating artist style. Earlier
| on in the Stable Diffusion days it even got fairly
| meanspirited - someone would make a lora for an artist
| (or there would be enough in the training data for the
| base model to not need it) and an artist would complain
| about people using it to copy their style, and then there
| would be an influx of people making more and better LORAs
| for that artist. Sam Yang put out what was initially a
| relatively tame tweet complaining about it, and people
| instantly started trying to train them just to replicate
| his style even more closely.
| astrange wrote:
| Note, the original artist whose style Stable Diffusion
| was supposedly copying (Greg someone, a "concept art
| matte painting" artist) was in fact never in the training
| data.
|
| Style is in the eye of the beholder and it seems that the
| text encoder just interpreted his name closely enough for
| it to seemingly work.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Greg Rutkowski
|
| Early stable diffusion prompting was a lot of cargo cult
| copy pasting random crap in as part of every prompt.
| furyofantares wrote:
| I've seen plenty of artists start by painting over an image
| they got from google image search, and end with something
| incredible.
|
| And it's not that limiting. You aren't stuck with anything
| you start with. You can keep painting.
| layer8 wrote:
| And then you decide that the "starting point" is good enough
| because the deadline is looming.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| But why? It's not all that much harder to do original work
| than redrawing the output of an AI.
| nomel wrote:
| I'm not an artist, so I won't comment on the "ease", but if
| it were true, then why would a ban would be required?
|
| Regardless, you should check out the AI features in the
| adobe products [1]. Generative removal, fill, etc [2].
|
| AI, in modern tools, is not just "draw the scene so I can
| trace it".
|
| [1] https://www.adobe.com/ai/overview/features.html
| Hamuko wrote:
| If that Disney Star Wars creature AIslop video was any
| indication, that starting point is pretty fucking bad.
|
| https://youtu.be/E3Yo7PULlPs?t=668
| nomel wrote:
| For an artist, the starting point is blank page, followed
| by a blur of erased initial sketches/strokes. And, sources
| of inspiration are still a useful thing.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Has it occurred to you if this tooling was good, _you wouldn
| 't need to encourage creatives so hard to use it?_
| TitaRusell wrote:
| Not to mention that it could be a legal minefield if your
| designer uses AI.
| layer8 wrote:
| Some providers offer indemnification:
| https://openai.com/policies/services-
| agreement/#:~:text=13.%...
|
| The other problem is that AI-generated material does itself
| not enjoy copyright protection.
| lovich wrote:
| 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
| miiiiiike wrote:
| Yeah they used to have quarterly reports where they talked
| about their plans for world domination.
| steele wrote:
| Lore accurate
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| Only the tech priests know the right incantations and rituals
| to commune with the holy machine spirit.
| pluralmonad wrote:
| It always amuses me to think of technologists as the modern
| day Egyptian priests/magicians. To the uninitiated, what we
| do is probably just as opaque and mysterious. Plus we have
| our own fair share of charlatans.
| hacker_homie wrote:
| For who, Roboute Guilliman be using the Cawl Inferior like
| chatGPT.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I trust Data more than Lore.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Their finance guys will use it to determine how to price three
| sprues of abs plastic for the most they possibly can though!
| crooked-v wrote:
| 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.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| And that's probably the OpenAI killer. If any of my work
| product from now to 2030 could legitimately be entangled in any
| of the millions of coming copyright claims, I am in a world of
| hurt.
|
| This fast run to use LLMs in everything can be undone by one
| court decision - and the sensible thing is to isolate as much
| as you can.
|
| Really interesting insight
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > If any of my work product from now to 2030 could
| legitimately be entangled in any of the millions of coming
| copyright claims, I am in a world of hurt.
|
| right... there has been ample code and visual art around to
| copy for decades, and people have, and they get away with it,
| and nothing bad happens, and where are the "millions of
| coming copyright claims" now?
|
| i don't think what you are talking about has anything to do
| with killing openai, there's no one court decision that has
| to do with any of this stuff.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> there has been ample code and visual art around to copy
| for decades, and people have, and they get away with it,
| and nothing bad happens_
|
| Some genres of music make heavy use of 'samples' - tiny
| snippets of other recordings, often sub-5-seconds. Always a
| tiny fraction of the original piece, always chopped up,
| distorted and rearranged.
|
| And yet sampling isn't fair use - the artists have to
| license every single sample individually. People who
| release successful records with unlicensed samples can get
| sued, and end up having to pay out for the samples that
| contributed to their successful record.
|
| On the other hand, if an artist likes a drum break but
| instead of sampling it they pay another drummer to re-
| create it as closely as possible - that's 100% legal, no
| more copyright issue.
|
| Hypothetically, one could imagine a world where the same
| logic applies to generative AI - that art generated by an
| AI trained on Studio Ghibli art is a derivative work the
| same way a song with unlicensed drum samples is.
|
| I think it's extremely unlikely the US will go in that
| direction, simply because the likes of nvidia have so much
| money. But I can see why a cautious organisation might want
| to wait and see.
| orwin wrote:
| Also I don't think it will be easy to defend a copyright on
| AI-generated images, especially if your IP is 'lot of
| humanoid soldiers in power armor' and not specific
| characters.
| nl wrote:
| OpenAI indemnifies customers against copyright claims: https:
| //www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=671fdd7f-3cef...
| madhadron wrote:
| Indemnification only means something if the indemnifying
| party exists and is solvent. If copyright claims on
| training data got traction, it would be neither, so it
| doesn't matter if they provide this or not. They probably
| won't exist as a solvent entity in a couple years anyway,
| so even the question of whether the indemnification means
| anything will go away.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| 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.
| tamimio wrote:
| Correct, all of these is about shifting the power dynamics into
| the middle managers rather than the engineers, who are already
| trusted to design and develop the system. It's as if always
| there should be some gate keeping and wrangling work in place
| so these managers feel they are not useless in the overall
| process. Just design a process that ensures the outcome is of
| xyz quality and never check how and where it was done, but
| human nature to control is always there.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| I believe the lore appropriate term is Abominable Intelligences.
| hibikir wrote:
| If they want to be lore accurate, then they should also ise
| them constantly, just in the down low. There is a C'tan in
| their version of Mars after all
| miiiiiike wrote:
| 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.
| ronsor wrote:
| This basically reflects my observations.
|
| > Games Workshop elects not to experience multi-year headache.
| Will use AI when profitable.
|
| Indeed, companies will always start using something if it makes
| financial sense for them.
|
| > One thing I've found when talking to non-technical board
| gamers about AI is that while they 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."
|
| This is because they don't view programming as a "creative"
| form of labor. I think this is an incorrect view, but this
| knowledge is at least useful in weighting their opinions.
|
| The most interesting observation is that regardless of how
| "anti-AI" most people seem to be, it isn't that deep of an
| opinion. Their stated preference is they don't want any AI
| anywhere, but their revealed preference is they'll continue to
| spend money as long as the product is good. Most products
| produced with AI, however, are still crap.
| StrLght wrote:
| > Indeed, companies will always start using something if it
| makes financial sense for them.
|
| I agree that this is often the case. I still see Games
| Workshop as an exception. They could have moved plastic
| production to a cheaper region (e.g. China), but they haven't
| done so. Financials are obviously important to them, but
| they're being very careful and thoughtful about their
| actions. This AI ban is just another showcase of that.
| miiiiiike wrote:
| The UK production is mostly about speed (turnaround from 3d
| prototype, to mold, to finished sprue, and 'Eavy Metal
| painted promo images) and quality control for the models.
| All of their paper and hard plastic products (books, dice,
| etc) are produced in China.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > The most interesting observation is that regardless of how
| "anti-AI" most people seem to be, it isn't that deep of an
| opinion. ... Most products produced with AI, however, are
| still crap.
|
| how can you go and generalize about these people, calling
| them idiots (that's what "deep of an opinion" means, even if
| you don't say that), and then breathlessly engage in the
| exact same rhetoric?
| wduquette wrote:
| I took him to mean "deep" in the sense of "strongly felt",
| not as a comment on how sensible or well-informed the
| opinion is.
| ronsor wrote:
| This is the right interpretation
| miiiiiike wrote:
| That's the thing. One day everyone is going to just stop
| caring about being anti-AI. Already I've noticed that most
| people are only against other people's use of AI. Their use
| is justified.
|
| I actively don't use AI because the results are unreliable or
| ugly. I'm just not against AI in principle. It's funny that
| my position is considered contemptible by people who
| regularly use AI but are hard hardliners against it on moral
| grounds.
|
| Remember when everything wasn't a religious war? Actually, I
| don't. It was always like this and it's always going to be
| like this. Just one forever crusade after another.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| I am going to sound cynical, but I strongly believe that
| everyone's view on AI is contaminated by ulterior motives,
| and a lot of people are not truthful with themselves about
| their positions on AI. For instance, I feel as though topics
| such as copyright, environmentalism, water use, etc., that
| have been thrust into the limelight are being pushed by
| people who didn't care about these issues 5-10 years ago, but
| decided to start clutching their pearls about it now.
| Particularly copyright; everyone was so okay with pirating
| movies, apps, music when it benefited them, but now they are
| the vanguard in enforcing other people's copyright on data
| they don't even own.
| casey2 wrote:
| Suddenly people change their tune, what gives? All we are
| talking about is the forced wealth transfer of trillions of
| dollars to the richest megacorps on the planet.
|
| Most people didn't choose to be part of your moon shot
| death cult. Only the people at the tippy top of the pyramid
| get golden parachutes off Musk's exploding rocket.
|
| They never changed their position, corpos shouldn't get any
| money! That's always been the position. They are inherently
| unethical meat grinders.
| a4isms wrote:
| > everyone was so okay with pirating movies, apps, music
| when it benefited them, but now they are the vanguard in
| enforcing other people's copyright on data they don't even
| own.
|
| You do not mention the perception of asymmetric legal and
| market power. Many people think that file sharing Disney
| movies is ok, but Google scraping the art of independent
| artists to create AI is not ok. That is not the same
| dynamic at all as not caring about copyright, and then
| suddenly caring about copyright.
| wk_end wrote:
| > while they 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."
|
| Three things:
|
| 1. People simply don't respect programming as a creative, human
| endeavour. Replacing devs with AI is viewed in the same way as
| replacing assembly line workers with robots.
|
| 2. Somewhat informed people might know that for coding tasks,
| LLMs are broadly trained on code that was publicly shared to
| help people out on Reddit or SO or as part of open-source
| projects (the nuance of, say, the GPL will be lost). Whereas
| the art is was trained on is, broadly speaking, copywritten.
|
| 3. And, related to two: people feel great sympathy for artists,
| since artists generally struggle quite a bit to make a living.
| Whereas engineers have solid, high paying white collar jobs;
| thus, they're not considered entitled to any kind of sympathy
| or support.
| throwaway2027 wrote:
| Most of the code that was publicly available to be trained on
| is written by people in their spare time, not directly making
| any money off of it though. Personally I think if you are
| fine with AI used to generate code you should also be fine
| with it being used to generate art. That doesn't mean that I
| think that big companies just scraping the entire internet
| and training on large amount of portfolio pieces from
| ArtStation or people making open source projects is good
| either.
| Groxx wrote:
| There is the nuance that much code that is available
| publicly (which includes a GIGANTIC amount of that "written
| by people in their spare time" stuff) is put there for the
| explicit goal of showing other people all the details so
| they can read, reuse, and modify it. Open-source licenses
| in some form are incredibly popular, though the details
| vary, and seeing your side project in a product that 100k
| people use is usually just neat, not "you stole from me".
|
| Artworks have their relatively-popular creative-commons
| stuff, and some of those follow a similar "do whatever"
| vibe, but I far more frequently see "attribution required"
| which generally requires it at the point of use, i.e.
| immediately along-side the art-piece. And if it's something
| where someone saw your work once and made something
| different separately, the license generally does not apply.
| LLMs have no way to do that kind of attribution though, and
| hammer out stuff that looks eerily familiar but isn't
| pixel-precise to the original, so it feels like and
| probably _is_ an unapproved use of their work.
|
| The code equivalent of this is usually "if you have source
| releases, include it there" or a very few have the
| equivalent of "please shove a mention somewhere deep in a
| settings screen that nobody will tap on". Using _that_ code
| for training is I think relatively justifiable. The
| licenses matter (and have clearly been broadly ignored,
| which should not be allowed) but if it wasn 't prohibited,
| it's generally allowed, and if you didn't want that you
| would need to choose a restrictive license or not publish
| it.
|
| Plus, like, artists generally _are_ their style, in
| practical terms. So copying their style is effectively
| impersonation. Coders on the other hand often
| _intentionally_ lean heavily on style _erasing_ tools like
| auto-formatters and common design patterns and whatnot, so
| their code blends cleanly in more places rather than
| sounding like exclusively "them".
|
| ---
|
| I'm generally okay with _permissive_ open source licensed
| code being ingested and spat back out in a useful product.
| That 's kinda the point of those licenses. If it requires
| attribution, it gets murky and probably leans towards "no"
| - it's clearly not a black-box re-implementation, the LLMs
| are observing the internals and sometimes regurgitate it
| verbatim and that is generally not approved when humans do
| it.
|
| Do I think the biggest LLM companies are staying within the
| more-obviously-acceptable licenses? Hell no. So I avoid
| them.
|
| Do I trust _any_ LLM business to actually stick to those
| licenses? ... probably not right now. But one could exist.
| Hopefully it 'd still have enough training data to be
| useful.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Most of the code that was publicly available to be
| trained on is written by people in their spare time, not
| directly making any money off of it though._
|
| So what? The code is offered under specific licensing
| terms. Not adhering to those terms is just as wrong as
| training on a paid product.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > 1. People simply don't respect programming as a creative,
| human endeavour. Replacing devs with AI is viewed in the same
| way as replacing assembly line workers with robots.
|
| It is about scarcity: art is a passion; there is a perpetual
| oversupply of talented game designers, visual graphic
| artists, sculptors, magna artists, music composers,
| guitarists, etc...you can hire one and you usually can hire
| talent for cheap because...there is a lot of talent.
|
| Programmers are (or were?) expensive because, at least in
| recent times, talented ones are expensive because they are
| rare enough.
| ronsor wrote:
| A good artist is just as expensive as a good programmer.
| Commissioning art is expensive. Outsourcing to third world
| countries is cheaper (just like programming!).
| danaris wrote:
| But if you want a finished artwork, chances are it's
| going to take an amount of time worth $50-150.
|
| If you want a finished (nontrivial) program, chances are
| it's going to take at least an order of magnitude more
| than that.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > A good artist is just as expensive as a good
| programmer.
|
| Let's look at industry, and just go look at what video
| game artists make compared to programmers with a similar
| amount of experience. Now, are you just claiming that
| they just aren't very good artists, so they aren't paid
| well? Because I've seen their work, and its not shabby at
| all.
| ronsor wrote:
| Video game companies are a special case (even for
| programmers). They work people to the bone for lower pay
| because people are passionate about video games, but the
| common denominator there is gamers wanting to get into
| the industry--not being an artist or programmer.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| I've been a professional artist, designer, and developer.
| Mostly a developer, and working in academia throughout the
| late teens meant being privy to the development of neural
| networks into what they've become. When I pointed out the
| vulnerability of developers to this technology, the "well
| maybe for _some_ developers but I 'm _special_ " stance was
| nearly ubiquitous.
|
| When the tech world realized their neato new invention
| inadvertently dropped a giant portion of the world's working
| artists into the toilet, they smashed that flusher before
| they could even say "oops." Endless justification, people
| saying artists were untalented and greedy and deserved to be
| financially ruined, with a heaping helping of "well, just _'
| pivot'."_
|
| And I did-- into manufacturing because I didn't see much of a
| future for tech industry careers. I'm lucky-- I came from a
| working class background so getting into a trade wasn't a
| total culture and environment shock. I think what this
| technology is going to do to job markets is a tragedy, but
| after all the shit I took as a working artist during this
| transition, I'm going to have to say "well, just _pivot!_ "
| Better get in shape and toughen up-- your years of office
| work mean absolutely nothing when you've got to physically do
| something for a living. Most of the soft, maladroit, arrogant
| tech workers get absolutely spanked in that environment.
| oytis wrote:
| > People simply don't respect programming as a creative,
| human endeavour.
|
| Because it's not? Programmers' ethos is having low attachment
| to code. People work on code together, often with complete
| strangers, see it modified, sliced, merged and whatever. If
| you rename a variable in software or refactor a module, it's
| still the same software.
|
| Meanwhile for art authorship, authenticity and detail are of
| utter importance.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| That's no different from any art. It's like saying that
| woodworkers' ethos is having low attachment to screws, or
| guitarists' ethos is having low attachment to picks. Code
| is a tool; the creative, human endeavor is making an
| artifact that people can perceive and interact with.
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| > Whereas the art is was trained on is, broadly speaking,
| copywritten
|
| The overwhelmingly vast majority of the code you're talking
| about (basically, anything that doesn't explicitly disavow
| its copyright by being placed in the public domain, and
| there's some legal debate if that is even something that you
| can do proactively) is just as copyright protected as the art
| is.
|
| Open Source does not mean copyright free.
|
| "Free Software" certainly doesn't mean copyright free (the
| GPL only has any meaning at all because of copyright law).
| avadodin wrote:
| > there's some legal debate if that is even something that
| you can do proactively
|
| Public Domain in the US is the only factor that truly
| matters on the Internet today, but people who care do both.
|
| Release into the Public Domain and provide a 0-type
| license.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Yeah people clearly think "creatives" are a class apart from
| white-collar workers.
| bartread wrote:
| > 1. People simply don't respect programming as a creative,
| human endeavour. Replacing devs with AI is viewed in the same
| way as replacing assembly line workers with robots.
|
| Very reminiscent of the "software factory" bullshit peddled
| by grifters 15 or 20 years ago.
|
| And I think, frankly, a lot of agile practice as I've seen it
| in industry doesn't respect software development as a
| creative endeavour either.
|
| But fundamentally I, like a lot of
| programmers/developers/engineers, got into software because I
| wanted to make things, and I suspect the way I use AI to help
| with software development reflects that (tight leash,
| creative decision-making sits with me, not the machine,
| etc.).
| abakker wrote:
| People don't respect the salary premium software developers
| have received and expect relative to other creative, human
| endeavors.
|
| You lay it out perfectly in your answer, and I'll add that
| the entire non-tech world generally feels that if tech jobs
| lose their shine due to AI, its actually a welcome reversion
| to the mean. Software has likely depressed wage growth in
| many other jobs.
| neutronicus wrote:
| Yes, anyone with an art-adjacent hobby like tabletop gaming is
| militantly anti-AI.
|
| Shelling out to support artists is seen as virtuous, and AI is
| seen as the opposite of that - not merely replacing artists but
| stealing from them. There's also a general perception that
| every cost-saving measure is killing the quality of the
| product.
|
| So you've got a PR double-whammy there.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > "Games Workshop elects not to experience multi-year headache.
| Will use AI when profitable."
|
| They will definitely start using AI when their competitors do
| to the point that they gain a substantial competitive
| advantage. Then, at least in a free market, their only choices
| are to use AI or cease to exist. At that point, it is more
| survival bias (companies that used AI survived) rather than
| profit motive (companies used AI to make more money).
| mcmcmc wrote:
| > Then, at least in a free market, their only choices are to
| use AI or cease to exist.
|
| That is a false dichotomy. Eschewing AI may actually provide
| a competitive advantage in some markets. In other words, the
| third choice is to pivot and differentiate.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| Games Workshop is more entrenched in their niche than any of
| the FAANGs. They can do what they want, because nobody else
| can do WH40K.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I can guarantee you that there are more than a few small
| producers in Guangzhou that can, and are using whatever
| advantage they can leverage (including AI, like the rest of
| China's industry).
| techpression wrote:
| Does GW have competitors? Feels like they own their niche
| (with the IP associated) completely with extreme amounts of
| content. Similar to how Magic rules their segment of the
| market
| mattmanser wrote:
| GW don't have competitors, it has an absolute monopoly on the
| 40k and Fantasy worlds it has built up. It's like saying
| there's competitors to LOTR or Star Wars or DnD.
|
| Their worlds are their monopolies. Worlds that now have
| multi-decades worth of lore investment (almost 50 years now I
| think).
|
| Just because someone else can make cheaper little plastic
| models doesn't affect GW in the slightest. Or pump out AI
| slop stories.
|
| The Horus Heresy book series is like 64 books now. And that's
| just a spin-off. It's set way before when 40k actually is set
| (10,000 years).
|
| With so much lore they need complicated archiving and
| tracking to keep on top of it all (I happen to know their
| chief archivist).
|
| You can't replace that. I only say all this just to try and
| explain how off the mark you are on understanding what the
| actual value of the company is.
|
| I live in Nottingham where GW is based, another of my friends
| happens to have a company on an industrial estate where there
| are like 3 other tabletop gaming companies. All ex-gw staff.
|
| You could probably fit all their buildings in the pub that GW
| has on its colossal factory site.
|
| You used to know people who worked at Boots, which used to be
| the big Nottingham employer. Now days, I know more people who
| work at GW.
| cthalupa wrote:
| BattleTech is somewhat of a competitor, and a variety of
| smaller games have some niches.
|
| Plenty of people use proxies, too. There's places that do
| monthly packs of new STLs that could be an entire faction
| army, and there's long been places that sold "definitely
| not Space Marines and Sisters of Battle" minis too.
|
| They don't have a threat of anyone overtaking them at
| current, but AI making alternatives in this vein even
| cheaper could eat away at portions of their bottom line.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| If GW couldn't drive their customers away with:
|
| * deprecating people's models so that they have to buy new
| ones
|
| * making any number of rules changes that were widely hated
|
| * making lore changes that were widely hated
|
| They aren't going to lose customers because some other
| company is using AI. They effectively don't have any
| competition, because people love the Warhammer settings and
| want to play games set in them.
| venndeezl wrote:
| Don't assume your experience is uniformly distributed. I know
| tabletop gamers addicted to AI and 3D printing their own game
| pieces.
|
| I would describe them as anti-corporate IP/copyright cartel.
| They understand things like automobiles and personal computers
| require organized heavy lifting but laying claim to own our
| culture and entertainment, our emotional identity is a joke.
|
| Just rich people controlling agency, indoctrinating kids with
| capitalist essentialism; by chance we were born before you and
| survived this long so neener neener! We own everything!
|
| Such an unserious country.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| I doubt a random internet commenter can persuade you, but LLMs
| and tools built around them are fundamentally different from
| NFT/crypto.
|
| NFTs/Crypto are just ways to do crimes/speculate/evade
| regulations. They aren't useful outside of "financial
| engineering." You were right to dismiss them.
|
| LLMs are extremely useful for real world use cases. There are a
| _lot_ of practical and ethical concerns with their use: energy
| usage, who owns them, who profits from them, slop generation,
| trust erosion... I mean, a _lot_. And there are indeed
| hucksters selling AI snake oil everywhere, which may be what
| tripped off your BS meter.
|
| But fundamentally, LLMs are _very useful_ , and comparing them
| to NFT/Crypto does a disservice to the utility of the tech.
| oconnor663 wrote:
| > They aren't useful outside of "financial engineering."
|
| Without disagreeing with your overall point in 99% of cases,
| we did actually have a good use for pinning things in the
| Bitcoin blockchain when I worked at Keybase. If you're trying
| to do peer-to-peer security, and you want to prove not only
| that the evil server hasn't forged anything (which you do
| with signatures) but also that it hasn't _deleted_ anything
| legitimate, "throw a hash in the blockchain" really is the
| Right Way to solve that problem.
| blibble wrote:
| > If you're trying to do peer-to-peer security, and you
| want to prove not only that the evil server hasn't forged
| anything (which you do with signatures) but also that it
| hasn't deleted anything legitimate, "throw a hash in the
| blockchain" really is the Right Way to solve that problem.
|
| and it only requires the same electricity as a medium sized
| country to do it
|
| continuously, forever
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The property that makes the blockchain useful for this,
| though, is that it's widely-distributed. "Throw a
| classified in the national newspaper" is just as good.
| Nowadays, we have better solutions (appendable BitTorrent
| comes to mind), with most of the advantages of blockchain
| but few of the disadvantages.
| cthalupa wrote:
| > 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."
|
| I had a conversation with an artist friend some time back. He
| uses Squarespace for his portfolio website. He was a few drinks
| in, and ranting about how even if it's primarily artists using
| these tools professionally at the moment, it'll still lead to a
| consolidation of jobs, how it's built on the skillset and
| learning of a broader community than those that will profit,
| etc. How the little guy was going to get screwed over and over
| by this sort of thing.
|
| I started out doing webdesign work before I moved more to the
| operations and infrastructure management side of things, but I
| saw the writing on the wall with CMS systems, WYSIWYG editors,
| etc. At the time building anything decent still took someone
| doing design and dev work, but I knew that they would get
| better over time, and figured I should make the change.
|
| So I asked him about this. I spoke about how yeah, the people
| behind Squarespace had the expertise - just like the artists
| using AI now - but every website built with it or similar is a
| job that formerly would have gone to the same sort of little
| guy he was talking about. How it's a consolidation of all the
| learnings and practices built out by that larger community,
| where the financial benefits are heavily consolidated. I told
| him it doesn't much matter to the end web designer whether or
| not the job got eliminated by non-AI automation and software or
| an LLM, the work is still gone and the career less and less
| viable.
|
| I've had similar conversations with artists before. They
| invariably maintain that it's different, somehow. I don't
| relish jobs disappearing, but it's nothing new. Someday, maybe
| enough careers will vanish that we'll need to figure out some
| sort of system that doesn't involve nearly every adult human
| working.
| numpad0 wrote:
| > ... 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 ...
|
| And this is not complicated at all. It's the quality of output.
|
| Users appreciate vibecoded apps but developers are universally
| unfazed about vibecoded pull requests. Lots of same devs use AI
| for "menial" tasks and business emails. And this is NOT a
| double standard: people are clearly ok when generative AI
| outputs may exist but aren't exposed to unsuspecting human
| eyes, and it's not ok if they are exposed to human eyes,
| because the data AIs generate haven't exceeded the low-side
| threshold of some sort. Maybe SAN values.
|
| (also: IIUC, cults and ponzi scheme recruitment are endemic in
| tabletop game communities. so board game producers distancing
| from anything hot in those circles, even if it were slightly
| irrational to do so, also makes sense.)
| jasonlotito wrote:
| So, stuff generated from AI is copyrightable now?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| It's not "anti-AI" to acknowledge the fact that when your job
| is to create work for hire in order to build up your employer's
| IP portfolio, being paid to use AI to create work that _isn 't_
| IP isn't doing your job.
|
| Your job is to create IP. As per the US Copyright Office, AI
| output cannot be copyrighted, so it is not anyone's IP, not
| yours, not your employer's.
|
| That's not "anti-AI", that's AI and copyright reality. Game
| Workshop runs their business on IP, suddenly creating work that
| anyone can copy, sell or reproduce because it isn't anyone's IP
| is antithetical to the purpose of a for-profit company.
| brundolf wrote:
| Very funny for this to come from the Warhammer studio,
| specifically
| arvidkahl wrote:
| 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.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| It's not as fancy as that but I've had luck simply asking an
| LLM to generate an OpenSCAD file.
|
| I wanted to adapt my bike balancer to an unusual sized wheel
| and simply measured the diameter of the rod and the outer
| diameter of the hole where the axle slides into, asked an LLM
| to produce an adapter, converted to an STL and hit print and
| got a fully functional 3D printed part. Felt like living in the
| future, maybe one step away from owning a Star Trek Replicator.
| lifetimerubyist wrote:
| You mean a technology primarily created by stealing content
| without attribution is being embraced by people that want to
| steal without contribution? Shocking!
| m463 wrote:
| I kind of wonder about game assets created by AI and if they are
| copyrightable.
| alienbaby wrote:
| 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.
| agentultra wrote:
| AI companies would love that. Just as oil companies love it
| that climate change is still debated throughout society. Big
| tech would prefer nobody cared about privacy.
|
| People are starting to notice and care about these things.
|
| Maybe I'm just not cynical enough about the "average" non-HN
| population but I think there are quite a few people who care.
|
| Lots of people from all walks of life play board games. There
| are a lot of people who refuse to buy games made with AI
| generated assets. They go as far as making forums and tracking
| these things so that other folks can avoid them.
| javier123454321 wrote:
| Well that's the thing that makes capitalism the most effective
| resource management system ever. If this is a bad play, and
| people do indeed find value from AI, it will be sink or swim.
| If it's not, then the ai forward will have to learn to stand
| out in the overwhelming sea of slop that they are competing
| against undifferentiated. That's why capitalists get paid so
| much, it's not a clear decision, in this case it seems
| contrarian, and if it pays off then they make money.
| agentultra wrote:
| 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.
| solid_fuel wrote:
| 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.
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