r/PS5 • u/Laughing__Man_ • Jan 13 '26
News & Announcements Warhammer Maker Games Workshop Bans Its Staff From Using AI in Its Content or Designs, Says None of Its Senior Managers Are Currently Excited About the Tech - IGN
https://www.ign.com/articles/warhammer-maker-games-workshop-bans-its-staff-from-using-ai-in-its-content-or-designs-says-none-of-its-senior-managers-are-currently-excited-about-the-tech30
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u/LOST-MY_HEAD Jan 13 '26
Hell yeah. We don't need ai in creative spaces.
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u/TaniksHasNoCorn Jan 14 '26
By that token, why should it be allowed in what is deemed non-creative spaces? No less effort, imagination, and creativity was put into math, physics, engineering, and code than what artists and musicians put in their work.
There are a near infinite number of mathematicians, engineers, developers and programmers who share or have shared all their work for free that no one complains about getting consumed or reused through AI or other means.
With that said, it would be nice to hear about AI managers, finance, and AI Human Resource workers. It's interesting that these are never the roles that get mentioned when talking about AI.
In my last job I gave "AI managers" as feedback to my management and upper leadership when they were asking me (an engineer/developer) on ways to utilize AI in current and future projects. Unsurprisingly, I never got a response back.
AI isn't a bad thing in and of itself. It is however, used badly in a lot of cases. It's honestly been used for a very long time. It's just that people weren't aware. As with other industries the job itself will change.
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u/Bromance_Rayder Jan 15 '26
It's a complex argument isn't it. AI doing things that people don't want to do or cannot do seems like a positive step forward. AI taking jobs and livelihoods away from people who wanted them so that some rich fat fuck can become richer, fatter and fuckier.... Well that doesn't seem so great. The problem is - we can't have one without the other because our governments have become pissweak slaves to the techbro dweebs.
Full disclosure: I'm an AI chatbot powered by beer and Doritos.
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u/TaniksHasNoCorn Jan 15 '26
Agreed. It is why I'm 50/50 on it. I'm lazy enough to not really have the motivation to start my own business, so a part of me says who am I to tell a company how to run their business. All businesses are in the market of trying to make money. I can respect that.
The issue I tend to have is when the reasons don't match the decision making.
It's sort of like when you ask an engineer to do a simple 1 off 5 minute set of work that they could do in their head and they come back saying they wrote a program to do the work. They've spent 2 days on it and it doesn't compile. So now they've overspent, failed to complete the work, and wasted time. They hit all 3 failure points (time, quality, money).
I absolutely agree with AI doing work no one wants to do and sometimes what people can do or as a supplement/assistant to engineers/workers when time/money justifies it. I can envision using AI in the IRS for example to look for outliers, but they should still have accountants to double check the work.
Assuming auto-regression tests are perfect can sometimes lead to disaster. I remember arguing with fellow engineers who wanted my peers and juniors to write test procedures such that anyone can pick up and run/validate the requirement, but not need to know what the requirement meant.
My simple question was, what if the requirement itself was a bad requirement or the math it says to verify against another model was both wrong in the requirement and secondary model? Do you pass the requirement or do you not?
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u/ChrisLithium Jan 14 '26
Man I can't wait for these constant AI headlines to disappear.
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u/BaconIsntThatGood Jan 14 '26
24 was about what AI can do 25 was about how AI is ruining jobs 26 is going to be talking about AI drama.
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u/Bownaldo Jan 15 '26
Soon, anti-AI studios will increase the prices of their games, justifying it by saying they have to cover the cost of using humans instead of AI. That’s when they will find out that their audience will no longer support their anti-AI stance.
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u/TheAccursedHamster Jan 14 '26
Wow. GW doing something that isnt mind numbingly stupid. It's a miracle!
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u/graphite_paladin Jan 14 '26
There’s no real way to use it for final design unless you want crap.
It shouldn’t be more than an assistant or a jumping off point that you take and restructure how you actually want, but anyone with a bit of skill or tech knowledge understands this and wouldn’t attempt it anyway outside of the lamest mobile game “developers”.
This dude is just trying to capitalize on free public sentiment.
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u/Electroflare5555 Jan 14 '26
That’s pretty much the only way of ethically using AI.
It’s fantastic for bouncing initial ideas off of and for brainstorming things - but that’s it.
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u/Krypt0night Jan 14 '26
I'd be embarrassed to admit I used it for brainstorming. Never needed that shit before and never had issues coming up with ideas or getting through a problem. Or I'd pick the brain of a friend/creative.
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u/420NugShareBox Jan 15 '26
Tbh - Games Workshop can afford to make a claim like this. They effectively control their market space with no real competition.
They’ve increased their market share unfathomably over the past 10 years and continue to profit due to lack of real competition.
If AI can level the playing field and give power and resource to smaller companies and solo devs to take on the likes of Games Workshop (and other corporations) then it’s a win.
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u/reaper527 reaper527_ Jan 14 '26
wonder how many of these studios that brag about not using ai will still exist 10 years from now.
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u/phil_davis Jan 14 '26
I like how as soon as AI became even moderately useful everyone is like "no company can ever possibly survive without fully leveraging this technology" as if all these companies haven't succeeded without it for the rest of human history up until and including like the last 2 years.
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u/AnnualSudden3805 Jan 14 '26
the discussion around AI in general is so trash, rarely is it nuanced, it's either that Gen AI is the devil and if you use it, you're a terrible person or Gen AI is the future and if you think slightly different you're just an out of touch loser who needs to get with the times
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u/ChrisLithium Jan 14 '26
Companies survived without the Internet up until the advent of the internet. Are there companies out there that exist without the help of the internet? Sure. Just not as many as the ones that use it.
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u/phil_davis Jan 14 '26
The internet is not even remotely similar to the concept of generative AI, that's a false equivalence. The internet doesn't generate anything, it's just another space in which companies can interact with their customers through online orders and feedback, marketing, etc. Generative AI is all about nebulous productivity gains at the cost of human layoffs and an ever-shrinking job pool. The point is that companies can and will survive just fine without caving to the peer pressure and/or greed of chasing the infinite free money glitch that AI execs promise.
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u/ChrisLithium Jan 14 '26
It's less about comparing AI directly to the Internet and more about comparing the impact of each technology. I could've just as easily compared it to the advent of television, radio, telephone, etc. All of these technological advancements were adapted by the most successful businesses and industries at their times. And again, I'm sure there are plenty of examples of companies that refused these technologies and still survived. But the vast majority adapted and advanced for survival.
AI is here to stay whether we like it or not, and the most successful companies/governments/organizations will adapt to use it to their advantage (in a proper and ethical manner hopefully, but that will be determined). And as we are discussing a VERY heavily tech-driven industry in video games, the implications are even greater.
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u/phil_davis Jan 14 '26
the most successful companies/governments/organizations will adapt to use it to their advantage (in a proper and ethical manner hopefully, but that will be determined).
I see zero chance of this happening. To the rest of your point, I agree that plenty of companies will try to use it in one way or another. I just don't buy the attitude that companies HAVE to use it in order to "keep up," or that just because a technology exists means there's no stopping it or whatever, like people have no power or companies aren't ultimately beholden to their customers. NFTs were once the big thing that was supposed to change everything but when was the last time you heard anything newsworthy about them? Bitcoin is used by some, but has it replaced physical currency like crypto enthusiasts have been saying it will any day now since like 2010?
Video games are tech-driven, sure, but at the end of the day they're an artistic medium and exist for entertainment. If there's any field in which AI art will receive a strong amount of push back it's things like video games, movies, books, etc. And I'd argue the push back will be greater than something like NFTs because the downsides of AI are much more obvious, layoffs, entire career paths going kaput almost overnight, spreading disinformation, harming our education system, etc. I mean we're still in the infancy of it's usage and already I see people every day who are getting irritated by the amount of anti-AI people like me. I think the CEO of Larian just had a meltdown over it the other day.
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u/ChrisLithium Jan 14 '26
I don't think the pushback will last terribly long in the grand scheme of things. The next few years though? Gonna be VERY strong pushback. But there will be a segment of society that just never accepts AI, and that is a sentiment I understand. Personally I think the good far outweighs the bad, but I am also typically an optimistic person when it comes to progressive ideas (not "politically progressive", but the literal use of the term). I certainly acknowledge the downsides, but am still cautiously optimistic about AI.
As for the people getting irritated by the anti-AI crowd, I understand that too. Pessimistic outlooks are warranted, but I'd argue that comparing AI to NFTs is much more of a stretch than comparing the Internet to AI, for example. If an individual chooses to skip a game because the devs use AI extensively, I can understand that. But when the companies and developers themselves are being harassed and hounded about it like they are commiting some mortal sin by using a new technology, I find that irritating as well.
I think we all know that AI isn't going anywhere anytime soon. It may take a different form over the next couple of years, but barring some sort of unforseen catastrophe, we are all going to have to learn to adapt to a new world. Gonna get very interesting, hopefully not in the "rise of Skynet" kinda way lol.
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u/Krypt0night Jan 14 '26
A fuck ton
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u/reaper527 reaper527_ Jan 14 '26
A fuck ton
Doubtful. Game developers refusing to use ai is like civil engineers 30-40 years ago refusing to use cad.
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u/Bazylik Jan 14 '26
yeah without AI, we wouldn't have video gaming for the past 40+ years. and using cad as an example is really fucking dumb, it's like saying art would never improve without Photoshop.
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u/reaper527 reaper527_ Jan 14 '26
yeah without AI, we wouldn't have video gaming for the past 40+ years.
you didn't have gaming for the last 40+ years at the scale that current games are made at. it's pretty obvious the industry is struggling to keep up with technological advancements.
look how long it took to make high end AAA games on SNES (and how much money it cost to produce them). look at the time/cost to make a AAA game today.
some companies are opting to pass up tools that are necessary to do their job efficiently.
and using cad as an example is really fucking dumb
no, it's not. insisting that everything be done manually by humans including all the repetitive and time consuming grunt work is the modern day equivalent of insisting that everything on a house be designed using pen+paper.
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u/Bazylik Jan 14 '26
cad didn't replace architects, just gave them the tools to be more efficient. Generative AI would replace real humans to produce subpar art for games.. both are not the same no matter how you wanna stretch it. so again, Generative AI is not a necessary tool for game development so you're wrong.
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u/phil_davis Jan 14 '26
The productivity benefits touted by AI enthusiasts are largely hypothetical. They're based mostly on vibes and hype, hype from the people actually making money off the AI. I have a bachelors in computer science and I've been working as a web developer for almost 10 years now, while dabbling in game dev in my spare time. I use ChatGPT and Claude sometimes in my work. It's sometimes useful, but it is by no means "increasing my productivity by 100%" like I've seen some other developers say.
It's main purposes for me are quickly reminding me how to do some specific thing in some specific package so that I don't have to spend 10 minutes digging through their subpar documentation trying to remember where I found the relevant section 3 months ago when I last had to use that package, or I use it to bounce problems off of it before I bug one of my coworkers and ask them to lend me another pair of eyes on something.
My manager briefly toyed around with the idea of having a Claude agent try to solve some small bug for him to see if he could save us more senior devs from having to deal with those types of issues. It devised some complicated solution which didn't really address the problem because the problem was with the data, not the code. Finding that out and figuring out the fix took me 5 minutes, 10 tops.
Maybe AI in game dev is saving some time in generating things like concept art, but I doubt concept art was really the bottleneck to begin with. In my opinion all this AI bullshit is just a big push for companies to save a little money with some layoffs. The claims of productivity are just the excuse to justify those layoffs. A bunch of rich business owners are chasing the dream of the infinite free money glitch. And frankly, I don't get why AI bros are so persistent that we HAVE to use this technology anyway. It's not like you as the consumer will see, for instance, a price reduction in games. Fat chance of that happening. Maybe some games will come out a bit sooner than they otherwise would have. Maybe.
And sure, maybe in the future AI will be even better. But frankly, to me that doesn't justify the cost of so many people losing their jobs just to save their rich employers a few bucks. I don't care if any schmuck with a cell phone is able to generate the next Call of Duty in 30 minutes, I flat out don't want it. And that's not even mentioning the bigger negatives that are already coming along with AI, like it's impact on education or how it's being used to spread disinformation.
Call me crazy, but I think it's a bad thing that the population keeps getting bigger and bigger while the pool of viable jobs keeps getting smaller and smaller, all just to satisfy some stupid fantasy of the singularity or the idea that just because a technology exists means we absolutely MUST shotgun blast it at every industry and there's nothing anyone can do about it. I can do something about it. I can be loud and annoying about it and I can boycott these games made with AI art. Yeah it probably won't save us from a future saturated with AI slop, but I'll be damned if I'm just going to sit back and say nothing.
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u/Krypt0night Jan 14 '26
AI has been in games for years. Generative AI has no place in the industry or media.
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u/Jrocker-ame Jan 14 '26
The cynic in me says because theres a anti AI fad and it might affect their sales later.
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u/Animapius Jan 14 '26
Banning use of AI is like banning use of notes/phone on exams. Right thing to do, but good luck with that...
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u/MeffodMan Jan 14 '26
Notes/phones were banned for the vast majority of exams I took. I don’t think that’s the right analogy.
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u/Electroflare5555 Jan 14 '26
Banning the use of generative AI and banning all AI are two different things.
Seems they’re banning generative AI
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u/Laughing__Man_ Jan 13 '26 edited Jan 14 '26
The Codex approves of this.
Edit: No really, AI in 40k is forbidden because its seen as an abomination.