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.

 

[M.T. Black]

In my own work in tech, I can see things as changing radically in the next 10 to 15 years, and that's about the time I'll be retiring.

Are you seeing any significant AI-driven changes in your workspace right now? Or is it more what you think is coming?

 

[BruceWright]

The thing is, it's coming, and in certain areas, it's already here. There's nothing that can be done about it. If you're giving a talk about the future of your investors, especially with a growing part of your business, you're going to talk about it.

Yeah but 3 years ago everyone was saying these same things about blockchain, NFTs and the Metaverse. (Remember how Facebook was so bullish on how they were going to make the metaverse that they changed their name to Meta!! Now a badge of honor of the thing they didn’t make!!)

I don’t think AI will crash as hard as those did. But i do think it’s very possible that its use cases won’t be as universal as they’re being touted. Or that ensuring useful, non detrimental and audience-engaging results requires hiring as many people as you had in the pre-AI model.

 

[Oofta]

Yeah but 3 years ago everyone was saying these same things about blockchain, NFTs and the Metaverse. (Remember how Facebook was so bullish on how they were going to make the metaverse that they changed their name to Meta!! Now a badge of honor of the thing they didn’t make!!)

I don’t think AI will crash as hard as those did. But i do think it’s very possible that its use cases won’t be as universal as they’re being touted. Or that ensuring useful, non detrimental and audience-engaging results requires hiring as many people as you had in the pre-AI model.

The replacement of software developers, in particular, has been predicted for decades. The job has changed and people have become more efficient but that just means they do more and can add more value to the businesses they support.

 

[Cergorach]

Google got caught torrenting pirated books to train AI ...

The article you link to is about Meta, not Google. But that's something entirely different imho from what others are talking about. The disclosed quotes are from a researcher and an email to legal. But not the reply back from legal... I'm curious what will come from this. If this will be put on Meta or on the researcher. Yes, this in particular is torrenting illegal content from an illegal source, the question then is also, was this used to train models? I suspect so.

What is also ironic is that libgen is a descendant of what Russian dissidents did in the post Stalin era, which kinda got legalized, a couple of decades later not anymore. And they just kept doing what they were doing, now no longer dissidents, then legal collectors, and now pirates... I wonder when this becomes legal again or they become dissidents again...

No, the cases were initially about companies seeking legal action against AI/LLM companies that collected everything on public facing sites and sourced from legal sources. They claimed that how this content was used was copyright infringement, and that's the big issue with AI/LLM.

Think of it this way: I have legally bought all the 50 years of D&D books (in pdf) and I train personally an AI model with it. After training it is no longer a copy and I always had a legal digital copy. Can I then distribute the trained model? I can use that same D&D library to answer questions from other people on the internet. How is me answering "Explain Planescape to me." different from an LLM doing that? Heck, I could write adventures based on that material, which I could legally distribute. Many companies discussed on ENworld have actually done so quite blatantly by rewriting OGL stuff and then licensing virtually the same stuff under their own license (ORC for example)... When Paizo does it, they are waving the flag for the common RPG player against evil WotC. When a big arse AI/LLM company does the same, they are also an evil company...

Talking about big evil companies, something like Google books has been around for 20 years, has had quite a few legal battles, but they were still scanning copyrighted books without permission of the copyright holders....

 

[SteveC]

Are you seeing any significant AI-driven changes in your workspace right now? Or is it more what you think is coming?

Yes. I'm really interested in AI, and my State has a conference that talks about it annually. I've gone to it for the last three years, and we get access to some next gen stuff as a result. It has gotten much better in the last three years.

So I was recently looking for a script to automate a task I do, which Microsoft recently changed. I looked around for a bit and then said, "Hey, I have this next-generation AI... let's use it." So I asked for a Powershell script to do the thing in the new version of the extension I use and ... I got it. And it worked.

In the past, I have done similar job searches, and it's given me garbage, or code that was for an earlier version of the extension I was asking about, so it was junk. I told a friend who asked it to generate some code he had been working on for the last month. It gave him something he could clean up and use. This is going to make our lives easier, and it's something I've seen get much better in the last three years.

Does that mean I'm going to be out of a job? Not right now, but it's always getting better.

 

[SteveC]

Yeah but 3 years ago everyone was saying these same things about blockchain, NFTs and the Metaverse. (Remember how Facebook was so bullish on how they were going to make the metaverse that they changed their name to Meta!! Now a badge of honor of the thing they didn’t make!!)

I'm not sure if I have posted about this in the past, but I can give a real world example. I was thinking about using AI for adventures, and I tried out something at work (with permission; my boss is curious but not judgmental). I said my rules system was 5E D&D. I then said my world had anthropomorphic animals, especially owls, otters, and prairie dogs. And then I said a band of three characters (who are based on stuffed animals my daughter has) are adventuring, so give me a campaign arc for them. And it did.

Was it great? No, but my daughter is 8, and it would have worked for her and her friends amazingly well. And I asked for other prompts for my current campaign and it gave me something to work with too.

That's something I can use, and it's only getting better. Will WotC be able to use this to write adventures, especially if they give it their world to play with? Undoubtedly. Will it be great and something that a real writer couldn't make? Not now. But ... if the recent thread about really good adventure modules is any indication, WotC has published books by real authors that weren't that great.

 

[jayoungr]

What a Cocks-and-bull story.

 

[BruceWright]

Was it great? No, but my daughter is 8, and it would have worked for her and her friends amazingly well. And I asked for other prompts for my current campaign and . Will it be great and something that a real writer couldn't make? Not now. But ... if the recent thread about really good adventure modules is any indication, WotC has published books by real authors that weren't that great.

I have a few thoughts, one being that nothing made for a child should be “not that great” if it can be helped in any possible way. The thinking of “well, they’re just 8” is opposite to my thinking.

The other is, well, yes, of course companies produce work that isn’t great sometimes. I plan to not purchase “not that great” products, whether they be made by people or machines.

The fact that every great adventure ever written was written by humans doesn’t make me want to rush to the idea that a machine should do it instead, just because some people have made poor ones.

Some human surgeons botch operations. But i’m still never letting a chimpanzee give it a go.

I grasp that the use case for AI here is not to write better adventures, or do new things never before possible, but rather to do the same old thing, just without employing human creativity.

meanwhile the same story-generating hardware that wrote the Odyssey, Gilgamesh, Hamlet and the Barbie Movie is available to me, 24/7/365 for FREE! And so convenient, i carry it with me, just above my neck.

 

[Umbran]

The fact that every great adventure ever written was written by humans doesn’t make me want to rush to the idea that a machine should do it instead, just because some people have made poor ones.

I am pretty sure the dream was for automation to take away the tedious heavy labor, leaving us humans to do the cool, creative work. Instead, having the computers do all the creative work, leaving us to flip burgers... doesn't seem like the way this should go.

 

[Stalker0]

Are you seeing any significant AI-driven changes in your workspace right now? Or is it more what you think is coming?

I write many emails using AI, all of our programming team uses it, and just yesterday my boss was complaining that every single interviewee for a job posting was using ChatGPT.

It’s right here right now