Blood Bowl creator Jervis Johnson agrees with Games Workshop’s AI ban, says ‘it allows you to be a bit lazy and not put in the effort’

Jervis Johnson is a legend in the world of tabletop game design. During almost four decades spent at Games Workshop he created Blood Bowl and wrote the core rules for Advanced Heroquest, co-created Necromunda, and wrote significant chunks of Warhammer 40,000’s second edition, Warhammer Fantasy Battle’s fourth edition, multiple iterations of Age of Sigmar, and several of the Warhammer Quest board games.

Though retired from Games Workshop these days, Johnson still contributes to projects like the Godzilla TTRPG and DreadBall All Stars, a kind of full-contact sci-fi basketball in contrast to Blood Bowl’s ultraviolent fantasy football. While discussing the latter with FRVR, the topic of Games Workshop’s prohibition against AI in its design process came up.

Johnson agreed with his old company’s take, saying that while AI “can do stuff that’s perfectly good in a middling kind of way, on the low-end,” he hasn’t been particularly impressed by anything he’s seen and doesn’t think it’s up to a professional standard.

“I think that if you’re going to do stuff at the top end,” he said, “do properly interesting, creative stuff, then AI doesn’t help you. It’s a hindrance basically because it allows you to be a bit lazy and not put in the effort.”

In Games Workshop’s last half-yearly financial report, CEO Kevin Rountree explained that “we do not allow AI generated content or AI to be used in our design processes” and snuck in an amusingly personal complaint along the way, saying that “AI or machine learning engines seem to be automatically included on our phones or laptops whether we like it or not.”

“Most of the stuff that I’ve seen doesn’t seem to actually quite match up to the hype,” Johnson went on to say. “I saw a great quote recently saying that AI is going to be like the asbestos of the internet and the computer industry. That we’re going to be spending decades getting this stuff out again after we’ve used it a lot and found out it’s actually a bit rubbish.”

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