Some Miniature Philosophy: Will A.I. paint our miniatures for us?

Once I published this. I sent it to 2 creators who like to tackle philosophical ideas. One politely declined to talk about “things they are not an expert on”. The other was Big Lee from Miniature Adventures who took the time to make a video essay, and for whom I am both moved and grateful that he did.

Two quick points worth mentioning from his essay:

He moved the timeline further in the future where slop appears in our hobby in a physical form. Where you could be buying miniatures that look great online, only to find out messed up A.I. slop sculpts that make no sense.

The second point was a deep philosophical one, where he points out that “In the end the conversation isn’t about wargamers, it’s about how people relate to making things in a world were machines can make things for us.”

So wargamers would not suddenly stop painting once automation is available. Like oil painters didn’t stop painting once printing press and lithography could produce images. It’s just that before lithography, people could make good money painting. Once this was automated, painting was switched from a profession to leisure.

In the video’s comments there was a discussion about the actual technology available right now, and it turns out we already can print painted resin miniatures.

Its not something you can do at home. You would need at least 20k for the printer and I can imagine the materials and costs of the print itself would be prohibitive for wargaming. But the tech is here, which means it will be commercially available one day.

This is the tech for the 3d printing part. Fon Davis (the special effects guy being interviewed) did not mention anything about any A.I. sculpting or coloring the sculpt. Its still 100% human artists, and Fon implied that they are scarce. So for now, even if the printer was available in wargamers homes, actual humans would still have to create coloured sculpt files. This sounds far harder than sculpting a 3d model, so unless A.I. can somehow take the task, owners of said machines will print the same handful of coloured models. Don’t expect to be able to print fully coloured Carolingian Franks in this decade.

As Big Lee says, the hobby will evolve once more. Some people will stick to metal, others will work on 3d prints doing shading or kitbashing, and others will be taking up those skills digitally, pre-painting sculpts, or printing the basic colours and using a brush for details and shades.

All the miniatures we see online today are painted at a stunningly good level. But I found proof that in reality most wargamers can barely paint anymore:

I grew up in Greece in the 80s. No internet, hardly any magazines. Games Workshop books had some colorful battle scenes, but other than that, you never saw painted miniatures in any media. Even the Ral Partha and Wargames Foundry and Citadel catalogues where in black and white. The only painted miniatures we ever saw where ‘in the flesh’. At events, in store displays, or the ones belonging to friends.

Today, the Instagram effect is prominent in our hobby as it is in every single interest or niche. All social media display miniatures painted to a standard humanely incredible. The level is such that we, the consumers of the content find it impossible to mimic. Even the tutorial videos seem to magically transform a miniature from black to alive with a couple of brush strokes.

Painting Standards are Collapsing across Events! That’s the title of a recent Lords of War video where the observation is made that completely unpainted miniatures are becoming a norm even in official GW events, and that the painted armies lack basic highlighting or are just sloppily speedpainted.

The video does not name the culprit. But to my mind the obvious cause is doom scrolling social media. People are unable to concentrate and do creative work. Concentration is hence achieved mostly by the content creators, since for them its both a job and a hunt for dopamine through likes and attention.  For the rest of us, buying the products and adding them in the pile of shame is the hobby.

This phenomenon is not unique to our hobby of course. I sometimes have to attend videogames events due to my job. I saw that cosplay competition a few weeks ago. I couldn’t help but notice that most contestants looked overweight. Cosplayers used to look skinny. I asked my much younger colleague what’s going on. He said “Don’t you recognize them? Those are the same girls who used to be 16 or 18 back when it all started. They’re all in their mid-30s now” He also added that the quality of the costumes has collapsed! I learn now that today’s underage kids do cosplay. But they actually buy pre-made costumes from China, and take pictures for Social Media. They don’t build the costumes themselves, and pre-made costumes are not allowed in Cosplay competitions. So today’s kids don’t compete. They just post online. The culprit is the same. Doom scrolling makes it impossible to put the hours needed to make costumes. Who cares about kids though. Kids don’t play wargames.

We had our “pre-made” era as well. Pre-painted miniatures where a thing 15 years ago, but I hardly see any in stores here anymore. This fad never reached Wargames but it was a thing in RPGs.

I feel relieved pre-painted did not get popular. I like the fact that we get to paint miniatures, craft terrain and fight the battles. The multi-faceted hobby is creating multiple hierarchies which according to psychologists are important for men. But it’s not about hierarchies and competition. It’s the fact that we can spend hours painting on our own, with the end goal of meeting other people with our armies. And the hours we spent on our armies make them far more important to us, hence giving the battles extra psychological tension. Loss, fear, relief, a lot of sentiments present in wargames can hardly be felt when commanding an army you haven’t painted yourself.

Is A.I. going to produce painted miniatures the same way it produces art today?

Geoffrey Hinton, “Godfather of AI” said in a recent interview that the current LLM based AI technology is horrible at physical manipulation, so no robot will be able to paint models to any standard for the foreseeable future.

But I think we might be able to print pre-painted miniatures relatively soon.

In my day job I work closely with Creality, the 3d printer brand. There is fierce competition among the chinese brands. Innovation runs fast. We already have multi-color printing. It was unheard of, only 2 years ago.  I think ending up with some kind of hue altering substance that prints the colours at various tones depending on the print temperature or some radiation shouldn’t be impossible. I think printed miniatures can and will, sadly, be pre-painted at some point.

Does this matter? Yes it does. Painting models is hard work. Knowing a machine could do it for you with zero effort is discouraging. The same way it will be really hard to keep cooking meals yourself, if you own a machine that cooks perfect and healthy meals with just a prompt. However, since our hobby is VERY niche, I believe there could be years if not decades before RnD money is invested in pre-painting miniatures with contrasts and weathering, and there will be a long period where pre-painted miniatures will come with basic colours and wargamers will still have to work on them to make them look presentable.

It will be a different world. One where you can wish any toy into existence, the same way we can currently generate most kinds of artwork or text using prompts. But before we reach that point, I think we will experience the total collapse of social media, at least as we know them now. The tech is already at a point where one can generate any image or video at will, hence making it harder and harder to tell reality from slop. Once slop completely takes over, we will be back to the 80s, where the only sure way to see painted miniatures will be ‘in-the-flesh’ as the internet will just be full of slop.

We will keep seeing posts, and even kickstarter campaigns and sites full of products, miniatures, terrain, games that never existed, either as a scam to make us buy or back them, or purely for likes and attention, like bots have been doing till now. Sites like beastsofwar.com will become more important. It will get harder and harder to curate the news, content and posts and weed out the slop and scams, but this might be one of the few places where you can trust the content you see. At this timeframe, the people who used to paint minis and post them on instagram will obviously be completely out of work, together with any other content creator bar the extremely famous ones, but the rest of us, who just paint and game with minis will still have our hobby relatively intact.

So AI will one day produce pre-painted minis. But will it be playing our games for us as well?

Based on Geoffrey Hinton’s observation on the lack of LLM based AI to do physical manipulation, one can predict AI will be unable to play rank and flank games for decades to come, at least on the tabletop. Additionally, I think AI will be a pretty sore opponent in any wargame, since current LLM tech is designed and encouraged to cheat and lie (a recent video called An AI Literally Attempted Murder to Avoid Shutdown explains this point well). This cheating and lying to achieve the goal makes AI inherently incapable of playing games with subjective rules against both humans and other AI.

One could argue that there already exists A.I. that can play rank and flank games at least on PC. Creative Assembly’s Total War A.I. opponents have finally become relatively decent, they flank, they faint and they do elaborate cavalry maneuvers. But again, they only do that on a digital battlefield. The “A.I.” in that case is just an algorithm which works inside the game code. The code is so specialized that it would be impossible to migrate to another game, let alone replicate it on tabletop.

To summarize, I predict that there will be fully painted 3d printed miniatures available at some point in the far future, but I predict the total collapse of social media way before this happens, which is probably a very controversial prediction.

I hope ‘projects’ is not entirely inappropriate for my ramblings, and I hope my bad English didn’t completely drain whomever actually read this!