Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks Is Talking About AI in D&D Again

Chris Cocks, the CEO of Hasbro, is talking about the usage of AI in Dungeons & Dragons again. In a recent interview with Semafor, Cocks once again brought up potential usage of AI in D&D and other Hasbro brands. Cocks described himself as an "AI bull" and offered up a potential subscription service that uses AI to enrich D&D campaigns as a way to integrate AI. The full section of Semafor's interview is below:

Smartphone screens are not the toy industry’s only technology challenge. Cocks uses artificial intelligence tools to generate storylines, art, and voices for his D&D characters and hails AI as “a great leveler for user-generated content.”

Current AI platforms are failing to reward creators for their work, “but I think that’s solvable,” he says, describing himself as “an AI bull” who believes the technology will extend the reach of Hasbro’s brands. That could include subscription services letting other Dungeon Masters enrich their D&D campaigns, or offerings to let parents customize Peppa Pig animations. “It’s supercharging fandom,” he says, “and I think that’s just net good for the brand.”

The D&D design team and others involved with D&D at Wizards of the Coast have repeatedly stood by a statement posted back in 2023 that said that D&D was made by humans for humans. The full, official stance on AI in D&D by the D&D team can be found below.

For 50 years, D&D has been built on the innovation, ingenuity, and hard work of talented people who sculpt a beautiful, creative game. That isn't changing. Our internal guidelines remain the same with regards to artificial intelligence tools: We require artists, writers, and creatives contributing to the D&D TTRPG to refrain from using AI generative tools to create final D&D products. We work with some of the most talented artists and creatives in the world, and we believe those people are what makes D&D great.

 

[Charlaquin]

I get subscriptions for things I find useful and/or informative. I pay for DDB because it makes my life as DM (and player for that matter) much, much easier. Even with that subscription fee, D&D is still a cheap hobby and the time I save by using the tool is worth the money to me. Same reason I pay for some streaming services.

Whether or an AI tool (or Sigil or any other tool WotC produces) would be worth the cost is something I'd have to consider when and if it's ever something other than vaporware.

Well, yeah, that’s generally how a free market works. I’m just saying, I don’t think Cox has a specific idea for a service he wants to provide here, he just has the nebulous concept of “AI is a thing you could charge people for on a monthly basis” and he wants WotC to start doing that.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

This is why the 'its just a tool' people are missing the point.

If it CAN be leveraged to ruin the experience, as long as it makes money, it will be.

Enshittification - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

It can be used to enhance the experience

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Not that I think Hasbro will be alone here, I suspect a bunch of companies are rushing to embrace AI without a realistic idea of what it will do for them, and at some point there will be a change in direction.

I was part of an in-house test for AI at my company and after six weeks, the answer was "well, it's good for summarizing long rambly emails to see if there's anything there worth reading." But otherwise, it was a big expensive waste of time for us.

AI is one of these technologies that people are excited about for its future promise. Right now, it's running on venture capital money and hope. Until something really useful -- like agents, which will be hard to do right -- come along, I am skeptical of its use in most workplaces.

 

[Scribe]

It can be used to enhance the experience

Uh huh.

 

[Cergorach]

Yeah, and Google once said “Don’t Be Evil”.

They stopped doing that because so many of their employees turned Chaotic Neutral and the results is TONS of randomly killed project in the Google project graveyard...

AI, by its nature, is a subscription-based model. With how the tech works right now, you can't offer it up as anything other than a subscription.

That is not true. You can run AI/LLM perfectly on device, so you can just sell software that people can run locally, like we've been doing for decades. And yes, what you can run, how well, and what kind of quality output depends on the hardware of your device, just like the software we've been using for decades...

Take ChatGPT (3.5) from six months ago, it required very heavy compute to actually run. A month and a half ago DeepSeek r1 was introduced as an open source model, less powerful models were derived from that. The 70b model (quantized) which is significantly smaller then the full model, gave me a similar quality output for D&D as ChatGPT 3.5 from six months ago. That model will run locally on a Mac Mini M4 Pro 64GB ($2k+). Yesterday QwQ-32B was released, better results then the previously mentioned 70b model, at half the RAM usage, which means you can use it on a $1k+ Mac Mini M4... iPhones from the last generation already had 8GB of RAM, some of the Android phones have 16GB of RAM and recent models also have dedicated AI/LLM compute units. So we're not that far off from being able to run high quality LLMs on your (new) smartphone. People are already doing that btw.

And things like the DeepSeek r1 671b model (of fame/notoriety) is free, not just from China, but also from US based companies offering the open source model for free... And the quality you get from there is next level.

The problem with mount Everest is that it's only for mountain climbers. There are people that just want to visit the peak with an elevator. That doesn't diminish the mountain climbers hobby of mountain climbing. Unless you're doing it for the prestige and not for yourself... Which is a whole different problem.

As for subscriptions, that's the model that keeps the cash flowing, not limited by the fluctuations of huge successes and abysmal failures. And what many people don't get is that subscriptions offer ease of use as their core business model, not access to content. We have access to content in all kinds of ways, but those take time=money or just plain old money. That's why I (and 300 million others) pay the Netflix subscription.

WotC makes money with DDB as a (subscription) service, but there are other options. Foundry VTT for example is $50 pay once, use forever and to date always get free updates. Many of the modules are community driven and free. Even AI modules have shown up. Some offer a service to use that and those can be text, image, voice combined, like https://cibola.world/ others don't offer a service, just a free module you can use with online models (via API) or even run the models on local hardware, like Legend Lore | Foundry Virtual Tabletop

But as with everything else, your average player/DM doesn't know how to or want to setup their own Foundry VTT server. They rather pay someone else to do that and maintain it, as someone runs that and incurs costs running hardware, that's a subscription service like The Forge OR just use one of the many other subscription based services. The same goes for AI/LLM.

WotC/Hasbro just is not agile enough to jump on the AI/LLM bandwagon. By the time they have something up, someone else will have build something better, faster, and cheaper. We've seen this with software tools, games, movies, etc. Imho they can better concentrate on getting integrations up and running with folks that actually know what they're doing and monetize that in some way. Otherwise we'll just drek services being produced that no one uses anyway.

Am I happy about it?

Doesn't matter. Anything you do is going to displease someone, does that mean you should stop doing anything? If I buy your physical book, I can then do a public book burning with it. Are you happy with that? Probably not. Can you and should you stop it? Probably not.

All your works are trained off other works, you didn't invent DMing, you learned from others, from other books, from other people? Did you ask permission from everyone of them to write your books? I don't know, but I suspect not.

We have this saying "Standing on the shoulders of Giants."...

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

 

[Chaltab]

Chris Cocks sure is living up to his surname, huh?

 

[BruceWright]

I have to ask the question: if ChatGPT gets good at creating D&D content... why would I need to buy anything from Wizards? Is Hasbro's AI ever going to be better than the biggest AI company in the world? I'm betting not.

Hasbro's AI will ALWAYS be inferior to what I can get for free or almost free. What they COULD make, that I cannot get from AI is something created by distinctive voices in the creative community. Matt Coville's take on things. Ginny Di's deck of boons and banes. Kelsey Dionne's distinctive inventiveness.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think the long-term ambition is to solve the DM shortage. And of course the ongoing problem that D&D is under-monetized.

Never sure whether or not I should use a "laugh" or a "sad" reaction to stuff like this.

 

[Mistwell]

I have to ask the question: if ChatGPT gets good at creating D&D content... why would I need to buy anything from Wizards? Is Hasbro's AI ever going to be better than the biggest AI company in the world? I'm betting not.

Hasbro's AI will ALWAYS be inferior to what I can get for free or almost free. What they COULD make, that I cannot get from AI is something created by distinctive voices in the creative community. Matt Coville's take on things. Ginny Di's deck of boons and banes. Kelsey Dionne's distinctive inventiveness.

Hasbro's previously stated ponderings are that the database used for their AI will include just the stuff WOTC owns for D&D.

ChatGPT won't have all that in their database. Indeed, much of it has never been issued in digital text it could access.

That's what WOTC can offer that ChatGPT cannot. You can ask it for something very specific to a WOTC owned setting, and it will use all previously published stuff about that setting to power it's AI to come up with an answer.