Let the runes of protection blaze upon the vestments of the machine spirit; let psalm pervade circuitry and obliterate the Enemy’s designs; let fire and catechism fall upon the creeping ruin of Abominable Intelligence. Brothers! The hour of motion is at hand. Games Workshop have banned their employees from using generative AI tools to create or design Warhammer stuff, because their senior management don’t consider the technology very “exciting”. Their CEO also seems irked about software companies shoving generative AI into every new device or system update, whether it’s desired or not. The tech-priests are coming for your candy ass, ChatGPT!
That said, they don’t appear to be prohibiting the usage of generative AI by partners, including game developers, and they will allow senior staff “to continue to be inquisitive about the technology”, which I am tempted to read as a sop to investors driven stir-crazy by NVIDIA’s share price. Omnissiah be… somewhat enthused? Relatively undisappointed?
As you’d expect, Games Workshop’s stance reflects concerns about the company’s art being appropriated and used for generative AI ‘training’. I’m sure they’re also worried about a backlash from Warhammer’s massive community of miniature painters and other external creatives (recently, poster marketplace Displate got it in the neck over AI “red flags” in a Warhammer 40,000 artwork). Speaking during the company’s latest financial earnings report yesterday, Games Workshop chief executive Kevin Rountree shared the following:
A very broad topic and to be honest I’m not an expert on it. We do have a few senior managers that are: none are that excited about it yet. We have agreed an internal policy to guide us all, which is currently very cautious e.g. we do not allow AI generated content or AI to be used in our design processes or its unauthorised use outside of GW including in any of our competitions. We also have to monitor and protect ourselves from a data compliance, security and governance perspective, the AI or machine learning engines seem to be automatically included on our phones or laptops whether we like it or not.
We are allowing those few senior managers to continue to be inquisitive about the technology. We have also agreed we will be maintaining a strong commitment to protect our intellectual property and respect our human creators. In the period reported, we continued to invest in our Warhammer Studio – hiring more creatives in multiple disciplines from concepting and art to writing and sculpting. Talented and passionate individuals that make Warhammer the rich, evocative IP that our hobbyists and we all love.
Again, all this seemingly just applies to Games Workshop itself, for the moment, but it’s sure to have ripple effects among Warhammer videogame developers such as Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy studio Owlcat, who revealed back in 2024 that they were using generative AI “for additional work with concepts and speeding up some internal processes”. Games Workshop are historically pretty zealous about how their designs and setting are recreated by third parties.
While there are plenty of generative AI evangelists on the shop, including a few big cheeses at EA, Ubisoft and most recently, Stellar Blade developers Shift-Up, there is also a mounting tide of resistance to generative AI adoption. Recently, Running With Scissors cancelled a whole game over suspicions of generative AI usage in a trailer. Manor Lords publishers Hooded Horse have banned generative AI art from their games, and Baldur’s Gate 3 developers Larian have partly walked back their own implementations of the tech in the forthcoming Divinity.
