Games Workshop has clarified that an eyebrow-raising Space Marine with an extra finger was not made by AI, but by the genuine mistake of an artist. The Space Marine in question comes from an art piece for Warhammer: The Horus Heresy, a game set ten thousand years before the events of Warhammer 40,000, where Space Marines were pretty much a dime a dozen. Stands to reason, then, that one of them could have had six fingers.
That's not the excuse Games Workshop is going for here, though. The Warhammer owner said in a Facebook post that we're not looking at a mutant marine in the new art, but instead the drama stems from a mistake. "The Horus Heresy art style, since its first edition in 2012, involves an artist blending miniature photography with art to create a dramatic scene. In this case, adding a little unexpected drama," GW explains.
Games Workshop has had a very strong anti-AI stance for a while now. Following its management looking into the technology and finding it had basically no use for the company, the Warhammer owner hasn't been nearly as welcoming to AI as other companies across the world. Fans would have taken it rather seriously, then, if GW had turned around and used AI for a piece of artwork. Fortunately, it's just a human mistake. Remember when we could have those, and didn't immediately think of smashing up the machines in a modern Luddite revolution?
