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Games Workshop bans staff from using AI
- ath3nd 9mo ago[dead]
- sleepybrett 9mo agoTheir finance guys will use it to determine how to price three sprues of abs plastic for the most they possibly can though!
- hwers 9mo agoI 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 9mo agoWell, 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 9mo agoalternatively, you can use AI as a starting point. All design is iterative.
- hollowturtle 9mo agoSure 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 9mo ago> 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.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- yndoendo 9mo agoIf 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 9mo agoImage 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.
- layer8 9mo agoAnd then you decide that the “starting point” is good enough because the deadline is looming.
- kryptiskt 9mo agoBut why? It's not all that much harder to do original work than redrawing the output of an AI.
- nomel 9mo agoI'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 https://www.adobe.com/ai/overview/features.html
- Hamuko 9mo agoIf that Disney Star Wars creature AIslop video was any indication, that starting point is pretty fucking bad. https://youtu.be/E3Yo7PULlPs?t=668 https://youtu.be/E3Yo7PULlPs?t=668
- nomel 9mo agoFor 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 9mo agoHas it occurred to you if this tooling was good, you wouldn't need to encourage creatives so hard to use it?
- yoz-y 9mo agoStarting from something basically done might have the same effect as spec music has done for movies.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- TitaRusell 9mo agoNot to mention that it could be a legal minefield if your designer uses AI.
- layer8 9mo agoSome providers offer indemnification: https://openai.com/policies/services-agreement/#:~:text=13.%20Indemnification https://openai.com/policies/services-agreement/#:~:text=13.%... The other problem is that AI-generated material does itself not enjoy copyright protection.
- jader201 9mo ago> everyone can tell and it looks generic when AI is used For now. I feel like the gap continues to close with each release, and it's only a matter of time before it becomes indistinguishable.
- lovich 9mo agoI’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 9mo agoYeah they used to have quarterly reports where they talked about their plans for world domination.
- steele 9mo agoLore accurate
- aleksiy123 9mo agoOnly the tech priests know the right incantations and rituals to commune with the holy machine spirit.
- pluralmonad 9mo agoIt 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 9mo agoFor who, Roboute Guilliman be using the Cawl Inferior like chatGPT.
- DonHopkins 9mo agoI trust Data more than Lore.
- Profan 9mo agoLiterally any familiarity with the lore and it just makes sense, the kind of people the 40k lore would resonate with are unlikely to be AI chuds in the first place. Though then again people do usually look way past any/all subtlety that might once have been intended and any franchise-ification of something usually destroys the remaining of originality as it becomes a facsimile of its original self. But GW do seem to take reasonably good care of their IP and world, so I respect them for resisting the imminent slop-ification at least a little bit, there's enough shitty 40k work out there in both book and videogame form already. I'm sure the Abominable Intelligence will come for them eventually too, but until then, the emperor protects.
- crooked-v 9mo agoGW 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 9mo agoAnd 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 9mo ago> 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 9mo ago> 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.
- armchairhacker 9mo agoWFH 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 9mo agoCorrect, 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 9mo agoI believe the lore appropriate term is Abominable Intelligences.
- hibikir 9mo agoIf 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 9mo agoDon'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 9mo agoThis 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.
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- brundolf 9mo agoVery funny for this to come from the Warhammer studio, specifically
- arvidkahl 9mo agoAt 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/ 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 9mo agoIt'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 9mo agoYou mean a technology primarily created by stealing content without attribution is being embraced by people that want to steal without contribution? Shocking!
- red-iron-pine 9mo agoyeah this was my first thought too. 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...
- m463 9mo agoI kind of wonder about game assets created by AI and if they are copyrightable.
- alienbaby 9mo agoI 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 9mo agoAI 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 9mo agoWell 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 9mo agoIf 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 9mo agoGood 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.
- red-iron-pine 9mo agothere 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.
- matty22 9mo agoIn 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.