{"id":489233,"date":"2026-02-19T03:12:23","date_gmt":"2026-02-19T03:12:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/489233\/"},"modified":"2026-02-19T03:12:23","modified_gmt":"2026-02-19T03:12:23","slug":"warhammer-designer-jervis-johnson-backs-games-workshops-ai-ban-as-the-tech-is-a-hinderance-to-design-that-will-be-the-asbestos-of-the-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/489233\/","title":{"rendered":"Warhammer designer Jervis Johnson backs Games Workshop’s AI ban as the tech is a “hinderance” to design that will be “the asbestos of the internet”"},"content":{"rendered":"

After a few years of retirement, Warhammer 40,000<\/a>, Necromunda, and Blood Bowl designer Jervis Johnson is working on a number of new tabletop games. In partnership with Mantic Games, Johnson recently announced his involvement in the Kickstarter tabletop game DreadBall: All-Stars, a sci-fi football miniatures game<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A reimagined version of the original DreadBall game, this new version is designed as a gateway tabletop game that features pre-assembled miniatures and simpler rules to get players \u201cstraight into the action\u201d. With Jervis at the helm, the new game benefits from decades of game design experience, and decades of human experience of how board games are played and enjoyed.<\/p>\n

In an interview with FRVR, we talked to Johnson about numerous topics, including his views on artificial intelligence in the tabletop space. Recently, Games Workshop CEO Kevin Rountree announced a blanket ban on Generative AI to \u201crespect human workers\u201d<\/a>, a decision that the former Warhammer designer agrees was the right move to make.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s the right move for a lot of companies to be perfectly honest,\u201d Johnson told us. \u201cI haven\u2019t had a lot of experience with AI because I don\u2019t use it. It\u2019s not the way that I work, and I\u2019m old so I don\u2019t have to. It\u2019s a newfangled kind of thing that I didn\u2019t really get involved with in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going to be spending decades getting this stuff out again after we\u2019ve used it a lot and found out its actually a bit rubbish.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jervis Johnson on the use of AI in game design<\/p>\n

Johnson explained that AI \u201ccan do stuff that\u2019s perfectly good on a middling kind of way, on the low-end, generally\u201d, but they have yet to see \u201canything generated by AI where I think \u2018that\u2019s really impressive\u201d. While many online in the AI sphere seek happiness in claiming the technology will rip away jobs from creatives, Johnson clearly doesn\u2019t see it.<\/p>\n

As a designer who has worked on some pretty pricey products\u2014let\u2019s face it, tabletop gaming is a pretty expensive hobby at times\u2014Johnson sees AI as something that hurts design rather than helps it. \u201cI think that if you\u2019re going to do stuff at the top end, do properly interesting, creative stuff, then AI doesn\u2019t help you. It\u2019s a hindrance basically because it allows you to be a bit lazy and not put in the effort.\u201d<\/p>\n

Johnson explained that Games Workshop\u2019s massive success with Warhammer 40,000 wasn\u2019t only due to hitting the perfect set of circumstances for release, but also it was only possible due to months of hard work from a lot of talented designers, writers, artists and more. \u201cThere was a lot of work involved there, a lot of thinking, and thought, and meetings, and planning, and discarding ideas. I worry that, with AI, what it does is it just cuts that out and shortcuts to kind of an average answer.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of the stuff that I\u2019ve seen doesn\u2019t seem to actually quite match up to the hype,\u201d Johnson continued. \u201cI saw a great quote recently saying that AI is going to be like the asbestos of the internet and the computer industry. That we\u2019re going to be spending decades getting this stuff out again after we\u2019ve used it a lot and found out its actually a bit rubbish.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Johnson explained that AI would only really be a viable technology is it can be \u201cthoughtful\u201d. Right now, the technology regurgitates existing material and slaps it together. Johnson\u2019s work on Blood Bowl in an undeniable influence for DreadBall, but even with Johnson\u2019s own involvement in DreadBall: All-Stars, that series is completely different due to both human intent in design, and also decades of learning how to design games, whether that\u2019s Warhammer 40,000 or something different.<\/p>\n

AI in gaming, largely video games, has been a hot topic as of late with groups like Larian Studios blanket banning AI for workers<\/a> after backlash for fans. Alongside the global RAM outages<\/a> and the huge water cost that AI datacenters siphon up, many generative AI critics point to the fact that its datasets are made up of stolen, copywritten material.<\/p>\n

Johnson\u2019s decades of work are likely a component of multiple AI LLMs, a fact that doesn\u2019t bother the designer all that much. \u201cYou\u2019re right, the stuff I\u2019ve written will be out there,\u201d he said, \u201cI think that\u2019s fine because there\u2019s an interesting thing that as a creative person\u2026 there\u2019s a quote I use a lot which is \u201cartists steal, amateurs merely copy\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think this is very true that there really aren\u2019t many terribly many new ideas out there,\u201d he continued. \u201cYou know, Blood Bowl, what it did was it took ideas that were there, but the game mechanics and stuff for First Edition were lifted pretty much straight from Warhammer and stuff. Youtake ideas and you move them around and put them together, but what raises you up is the intent that you use those ideas and the thought that you use those ideas with.\u201d<\/p>\n

So far, tabletop gaming has yet to be riddled with AI generated content like other industries, but the technology keeps popping up. In Warhammer communities, AI-generated \u201cfan\u201d content is often slopped around, and it simply isn\u2019t any good. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After a few years of retirement, Warhammer 40,000, Necromunda, and Blood Bowl designer Jervis Johnson is working on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":489234,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-489233","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/489234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}