Games Workshop officially bans the use of AI in its Golden Demon painting competitions

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After one of last year's winners incorporated generative AI.

Demons with paintbrushes.
(Image credit: Games Workshop)

The Oscars of painting little guys are the Golden Demon awards, handed out by Games Workshop at official miniature painting competitions. The entry guidelines for the 2024 Golden Demon awards contain a note in the FAQ section that wasn't present in the previous year's guidelines. In answer to the question, "Am I allowed to use Artificial Intelligence to generate any part of my entry?" it simply replies, "No."

This is presumably in response to controversy over the winning entry in the Single Miniature: Warhammer 40,000 category in 2023's Golden Demon awards, which was Neil Hollis's piece, Exodite. It was controversial not for the miniature itself, but for the jungle backdrop, which was printed with the assistance of the generative AI tool Midjourney.

In an episode of The Painting Phase on YouTube, Hollis defended his use of AI by pointing out how difficult it was, explaining that he "probably did 200 different prompts to get where I needed to be," and that "formulating it took a very long time." Which doesn't do much to defend his work from the actual criticism, which is that Midjourney uses stolen art. It's one of the AI tools subject to a class action lawsuit filed by artists based on their use of copyrighted art as training material. 

Hollis did bring up the topic during the interview, but only to mention that other generative AI art tools are trained on internal art libraries owned by the software's creators, not to explain why he used Midjourney instead. Replying to the critics who called his winning the award into question, he simply said, "The people that are angry on the internet are a certain type of person, and I think we call them virgins." I suspect it didn't help him win any fans online.

Meanwhile, the court case against Midjourney, which also incorporates claims against Stability AI and DeviantArt, recently reached a milestone with the judge ruling it could continue with some of the claims dismissed, though he allowed both copyright and trademark infringement claims to be made against Midjourney specifically.

Jody Macgregor
Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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