WotC Hasbro CEO optimistic about AI in D&D and MTG’s future

[Vaalingrade]

It's pretty much the fault of the tech bros hijacking the term 'AI' for the new fallback buzzword after NFT failed.

 

[Scribe]

Nothing we say here on forums like this means anything

Taken individually sure. Social media absolutely proves that if you agitate the water enough, waves are made.

So yes, suppression of peoples concern, censorship, even on a niche forum, absolutely does have an impact.

If you really didn't think it did, you wouldn't continue with various arguments you have made in the past, such as the ones around the OGL, you would simply shrug and move on.

 

[aco175]

Part of what makes this different than what's come before is the speed. To convert from horses to cars took decades. From leeches to medicine took decades. From ice boxes to fridges... you get the idea.

With what's occurred with generative AI, for artists it could be a year or two.

I saw a show or video on how the whaling industry collapsed in a year and a half after Rockefeller started selling kerosene. I do not think saving(ish) the whales was his plan, but a good side benefit. But I get the idea of a slow transformation of cars putting out farriers and breeders of horses taking a generation not being as big a disruption.

 

[Charlaquin]

I'd have more sympathy if I knew how you jump from "AI may be used as a DM aid" to end of times apocalypse.

As I said,

It’s causing real human people real suffering, at the cost of tremendous amounts of fossil energy, in order to produce torrents of slop writing and “art,” accelerating the global information literacy crisis in the process.

To be a bit more specific, the suffering I’m referring to is the mass loss of jobs in writing and art. The fossil energy cost is pretty self-explanatory; these large language models take huge amounts of processing power, which for the time being requires the burning of fossil fuels to achieve, rapidly accelerating climate change, which in turn causes more human suffering as disastrous weather events become more frequent and more intense, large areas become less hospitable leading to mass human migration, which has its own huge list of negative impacts, including yet more job insecurity. The global information literacy crisis is a complex topic, but in brief, the ease of access to information coupled with the difficulty of evaluating the validity of that information is how we end up with the recent explosion of conspiracy thinking. This is further intensified by the aforementioned job insecurity, as people become more prone to conspiracy thinking when they feel a lack of control in their lives. AI is massively increasing this problem as it dumps more information into the collective pool at a rate orders of magnitude higher than real humans are capable of, with absolutely no regard for the accuracy of that information. Meanwhile tech companies are racing to get AI more and more involved in the ways we access this information.

Does Hazbro creating some kind of AI NPC generating tool directly contribute to these society-destabilizing problems? Not really, except for the fossil fuel one (and frankly that ought to be enough on its own). But, it can’t be isolated from the broad effects of AI. These things are all connected, and as much as we may wish we could just have the nice parts as long as we can’t easily see the line between them and the bad parts, that’s just not how it works. If we want to minimize the tremendous global harm AI is doing broadly, we have to be willing to critique the less obviously harmful uses of AI as well. You can’t kill the Lernean Hydra if you’re only focused on its scariest head.

 

[TheSword]

I saw a show or video on how the whaling industry collapsed in a year and a half after Rockefeller started selling kerosene. I do not think saving(ish) the whales was his plan, but a good side benefit. But I get the idea of a slow transformation of cars putting out farriers and breeders of horses taking a generation not being as big a disruption.

I don’t believe that is the case. The television, the indoor toilet, the refrigerator. These went from scarce to common in the space of 10 years. Four transformative technologies that changed people’s lives in a single decade.

 

[Oofta]

Taken individually sure. Social media absolutely proves that if you agitate the water enough, waves are made.

So yes, suppression of peoples concern, censorship, even on a niche forum, absolutely does have an impact.

If you really didn't think it did, you wouldn't continue with various arguments you have made in the past, such as the ones around the OGL, you would simply shrug and move on.

That was a very specific and widespread criticism. Not this general angst about a general idea that doesn't even have a glimmer of what implementation might look like.

 

[Oofta]

I don’t believe that is the case. The television, the indoor toilet, the refrigerator. These went from scarce to common in the space of 10 years. Four transformative technologies that changed people’s lives in a single decade.

Think also airplanes, the telegraph, then radio and phones. There have been a lot of transformative technologies that made a big difference in a relatively short time. Not all of them were anticipated, I doubt the Wright brothers expected WWI to have people doing dogfights a decade later.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

So you assume the worst.

Nah. You're exaggerating my position. I think we will get some decent stuff - I'm an optimist. But my experience with corporations in recent years suggests that however optimistic I am that a CEO might be talking about something good, it's not usually the case.

I mean, when Cocks Williams said, "We think that D&D is undermonetised" I AGREED. I think it is too! But they and I are not talking about the same thing.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Nah. You're exaggerating my position. I think we will get some decent stuff - I'm an optimist. But my experience with corporations in recent years suggests that however optimistic I am that a CEO might be talking about something good, it's not usually the case.

I mean, when Cocks said, "We think that D&D is undermonetised" I AGREED. I think it is too! But he and I are not talking about the same thing.

He never said that.

Cynthia Williams said the Brand was undermonetised, in regards to merch, games, movies and other media. This was before the D&D movie and BG III came out too.

 

[SlyFlourish]

They couldn't skip saying or doing something controversial for the 50th anniversary?

CEOs going to CEO