WotC: We Are Not Making AI Dungeon Masters

Adding to the recent spate of YouTube-based claims about WotC's plans for Dungeons & Dragons were some additional claims -- (a) that D&D Beyond would have $30 subscription fee; (b) that homebrew content would not be permitted on lower tiers; and (c) that DDB was actively working on AI Dungeon Masters.

Some of this was based on a (long ago debunked) slide from a presentation last year.

WotC has made some clarifications:

Hey, everyone. We’ve seen misinformation popping up, and want to address it directly so we can dispel your concerns.

Rumors of a $30 subscription fee are false.

No one at Wizards is working on AI DMs. We love our human DMs too much. If you’re looking for a DM, we suggest heading to our Discord where DMs and parties are looking for players.

We have designers whose core job it is to compile, analyze, and then act upon your feedback. Your feedback has made the game better over the past decade, and your feedback is central to D&D’s future.

Homebrewing is core to D&D Beyond. It's not going away, and we're not going to charge you for it. Your homebrew is, and always will be, yours. We’ve always been excited to see your creations both on and off D&D Beyond!

There is still no clear statement regarding the Open Gaming License v1.0a, however.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

...and for only 29.99 USD, Matt Mercer will narrate the box text for you. #dystopiand&d

cough

Matt Mercer repaired my gear in World of Warcraft for a whole expansion.

And for only $15/month, too.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

View attachment 273055

I am so bummed, I would have paid for that and forgiven them for all their other sins.

Technically we have this, in the form of Baldur's gate III, Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder CRPGs, Solasta, etc.

But a ChatGPT-enabled DM is a long way off, I think.

 

[Velderan]

I mean, just because no one is working on it doesn't mean it's not a stupid thing an executive promised the shareholders. Remember "You will be able to use your AI gun on other games?"

People who have no idea how anything works beyond their bank account will say anything to convince other people who have no idea how anything works to put money in their bank account.

Juicero immediately comes to mind.

 

[arakasi]

Yugioh is kids friendly (in the US) and uses more then a little bit of Cthulhu themes and concepts.

Infact, one of the funniest things I ever did to my players was take a season long arc from Yughio GX, mix in an episode of Ducktales and file off the serial numbers and run it as a Cthulhu adventure... the best part is, as the final dark rider was about to appear, one of the players caught it... and blurted out in shock where I got my insperation.

Not as good as my 3e (not 3.5) gummy bear adventure where no one got it until the halfing asked if disguise self would let him pretend to be one of the dukes oger gaurds and everyone laughed at the idea of a small oger... then two them figured it out.

I'm writing a South American CoC adventure based on Encanto.

You really don't want to talk about Bruno....

 

[Clint_L]

Technically we have this, in the form of Baldur's gate III, Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder CRPGs, Solasta, etc.

But a ChatGPT-enabled DM is a long way off, I think.

I'm a teacher. It is causing an absolute tectonic shift in education, and that shift has only begun. Everyone is freaking out because this technology is here, now, and better than I think most folks realize. It could, right now, easily pass all the assessment tasks needed to earn many undergraduate degrees.

And if you work in communications, you had best be looking over your shoulder, especially if you work in any kind of office pool. ChatGPT already can do to a lot of those jobs what robots did to a lot of manufacturing jobs 40, 50 years ago. Humans will still be necessary for that kind of communications grunt work. But a lot fewer of them.

 

[Umbran]

... why trust anything coming out of Wizbro at this point. It can all be twisted, retracted, updated, or removed.

Said as if you expect significant numbers of folks are actually trusting it, as opposed to taking what they say as food for thought and conjecture, but generally waiting for the proof to be in the pudding.

Constantly shouting "OMG THEY ARE LIARS DON'T TRUST THEM" is getting kind of insulting to our intelligence, to be honest.

I mean, it isn't like any of us have any real decisions to make until they actually put out the new license anyway. We have no trust-based actions to take!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

And if you work in communications, you had best be looking over your shoulder, especially if you work in any kind of office pool. ChatGPT already can do to a lot of those jobs what robots did to a lot of manufacturing jobs 40, 50 years ago. Humans will still be necessary for that kind of communications grunt work. But a lot fewer of them.

There are a lot of AI run content mills already. If you read a web page, looking for an answer to something, and it's strangely discursive, repeats itself and sometimes has completely wrong answers alongside clearly correct ones -- and I have run into those a lot over the past six months -- no human ever touched that page.

I'm actually OK with this (other than the garbage responses when I'm looking for answers on something). I don't want or need humans to just retype someone else's news story or recipe for me, any more than I need a human to manually crank out a thousand nearly identical legal documents in a year. Some stuff the AI can have. Those aren't jobs people love now and the machines can have them.

That said, anyone who's doing a repetitive job they hate, just for the cash, machines are definitely coming for those jobs. And even the repetitive tasks in more complex jobs will likely get scooped up, too, which is fine by me. I don't want to have to manually look up data on a page and build a spreadsheet with it just to be able to begin work on my real problem. If I can send an AI agent to pull that data together for me, and rely on it to do so accurately, I'm 100% good with finding other ways to fill my work day.

 

[Scribe]

Constantly shouting "OMG THEY ARE LIARS DON'T TRUST THEM" is getting kind of insulting to our intelligence, to be honest.

And everything they say, is insulting to mine.

As soon as I see nobody taking Wizards at their word, or offering them any kind of support or understanding, the campaign can stop.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

As soon as I see nobody taking Wizards at their word, or offering them any kind of support or understanding, the campaign can stop.

This seems like a good way to get threads locked.

 

[Oofta]

There are a lot of AI run content mills already. If you read a web page, looking for an answer to something, and it's strangely discursive, repeats itself and sometimes has completely wrong answers alongside clearly correct ones -- and I have run into those a lot over the past six months -- no human ever touched that page.
...

So ... what you're saying is that you could be an AI. Or maybe I'm an AI and don't even know it!