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.

 

[Stalker0]

So the thing about AI and creativity. Sure it’s not super creative compared to the whole of humanity. But compared to me…it can be super creative because it pulls from experience outside myself. I’ll ask it to present 20 different ideas…and while 10 are trite garbage, 9 are ideas I would have thought of, but then you get that one that I would never have thought of, that makes me go “hey, that would be kind of neat”.

And I can generate and read through that in a couple of minutes. In fact I literally just did earlier today for a one shot I’m running tomorrow

 

[Scribe]

just yesterday my boss was complaining that every single interviewee for a job posting was using ChatGPT.

Thats amusing.

 

[ECMO3]

So I guess WOTC is going back on the pledge from 2 years ago never to use AI again and to make those it contracts pinky-swear that they don't use it either?

 

[Wincenworks]

A major distinction between generative AI and various other developments is its difficult to find a way in which it will benefit small creators.

Photocopiers basically made micro-zines possible by allowing people to type and format things once, then make copies of it for distribution - making it much easier for those who wanted to get feedback and distribute their works.
Tape recorders allowed garage bands and solo musicians to make their own recording, make copies of it, etc. Access to music and the ability to mix it etc arguably made hip hop, techno and other genres possible.
File sharing allowed small artists another avenue to distribute their work, and a more populist approach to "hype" as a song could become popular without the approval of gatekeepers like recording labels and MTV. It also basically allowed the rise of indie games as you no longer needed physical storefronts etc.
Digital painting resulted in massive amounts of new art which wouldn't have appeared but for lowering the barriers.

Generative AI is largely an attempt to devalue specialist and creative workers by threatening that the spicy autocorrect will replace them - it minimizes the input from the operator and works primarily by replicating what it has been trained on. It's immensely expensive, and we're already seeing Microsoft scaling back on their investment because there's no real value to the product AI creates.

It's a technology which sells itself as the inevitable future, but so did Betamax, cryogenics, Blackberry, crypto, virtual reality, Second Life, Laserdisk, Google Glass, Tor browser, etc. The disruption its creating is not indicative of its value, mostly its a solution in search of a problem, which is why we're getting tragic events like publications at Cornell that ChatGPT can do financial statement analysis better than many humans, only to quietly retract the paper 8 months later. After all... if it says it can do the thing, and the people behind it say there will one day be a omniscient super-AI... why not assume it can do something it was never intended to do?

Largely the main thing keeping it afloat is that there's a lot of capital slushing around and a big rush among venture capitalists to be the next one to ride a moonshot. A great example is Softbank, who are so comically overly optimistic with their ventures that Patrick Boyle can't stop making fun of them.

Masayoshi Son thought the problem with WeWork was not that it did nothing to address that shared office space is traditionally a low margin business over the long run, but that it wasn't ambitious enough.

He also thought that FTX was worth investing a $100 million in - and the only way to think that was to do literally no due diligence in the business (SBF explicitly told investors he would not be accepting input or requests for audit). It's worth remembering SBF's big vision was FTX would not just be a place where you could lose money on crypto - you could "buy a banana, you can do whatever you want with your money".

Soft Bank also invested $375 million in Zume, a venture which was to solve the problem that you could not yet have a pizza delivered to you by a robot that cooks the pizza on the way - also the robot would pick the type of pizza for you, for some reason.

It's a seductive concept, but the reality is its not really stacking up to much so the race is whether it gets criminalized or runs out of hype (and hence funding) first.

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

A major distinction between generative AI and various other developments is its difficult to find a way in which it will benefit small creators.

One obvious way is that writers can now use AI to generate high-quality illustrations for their products. It's now much more feasible to publish your personal project without needing to work overtime in your day job to fund the art budget.

 

[Yaarel]

If WotC offers AI services for Dungeons&Dragons , then probably it will be data-mining the DMsGuild for the content that the AI remixes.

Hypothetically, the AI can record which products it utilizes. Then if popular content relies on the Guild product, give royalties to its creator.

 

[overchord]

Now if they would use AI to enable us to mine all of their existing IP for worlds, automatically build timelines of lore and pull up all the information from various editions for a given location in FR, Krynn, Greyhawk or wherever - that, to me, could be a useful tool for all - and one that doesn't predate on creators outside of the company's existing IP.
As some have mentioned already - that would likely be a subscription service, but if it was well functioning, that is something I would consider to help me focus on the actual creation of new ways of putting adventures together.

 

[Black Dougal]

We don't need WotC to give us these "AI products" we can already do such things using the current offerings, most of which are improving very quickly. As for them using AI in end products, you get what you pay for and I sure as heck don't want to pay for that. I also have no interest in an AI DM. If it integrated with DnD Beyond including maps, Sigil, etc. sure I could see value in that for many. I do understand we're all in different mindsets and see value in different things but the above is my opinion.

ChatGPT is 20 bucks/month, Google Notebook is FREE (you can "train it" on exactly what you use at the table and only use that data), many AI agents are affordable to carry out tasks (create a hexcrawl based on the following data while I sleep)...with that stack right there you can do a whole heck of a lot. Also, keep in mind a lot of the power is in the prompting. Increase your bandwidth and free up time to be creative.

I've played with those "rpg specific AI" offerings and I can also see the value in that for many, but again for me it boxes me in quite ften and frankly none of the products out there currently really have me excited.

AI is complex and without touching on the rabbit holes with ethics I get why WotC would want to leverage AI, every other corporation out there is. Their job is to make money.

But remember you can also be imaginative and creative in how you choose to leverage AI. It can open up bandwidth for those of us with little time who want to free up time for the fun stuff.

I'm lucky enough to work with all kinds of different AI stacks with my job so I do realize some of us are more familiar and financially my job pays for it already. I also realize for some they want simple and there is nothing wrong with that. I could see why folks wouldn't want to spend weeks mastering prompts and choosing which AI for which usecase is best but I could also see some folks would want to spend weeks with AI.

I'm of the opinion of whether we like AI or not or approve of how it is used or not WotC like most companies will integrate AI...and I think it leads to all kinds of discussions on a slew of rabbit holes. Complex topic.

 

[Wincenworks]

One obvious way is that writers can now use AI to generate high-quality illustrations for their products. It's now much more feasible to publish your personal project without needing to work overtime in your day job to fund the art budget.

Well you can do that, but whether it actually benefits you is entirely another matter.

Marketing. First and most obviously, from a marketing perspective - if everyone has free and unlimited use of an "artist" then the presence of that artist in your work presents no advantage - you just blend in with everyone else. But glossing over that:

AI art is inherently generic, so while your image maybe "high-quality" it is not going to customisable for market advantage - and if it looks like AI it's going to look both cheap and offensive to people who personally find AI art disagreeable. If you work has a particularly novel or specific element that you want to market, the AI art may simply be unable to create anything resembling it and you'll spend your time fighting frustration as you try prompt after prompt, wishing you were just working overtime. At best, it can give you something quirky in a very generic style that is polished but non-specific.

Quality. "High quality" is a difficult term to qualify here as opinions vary wildly on what it means, with a lot of AI advocates falling into the "it looks polished" but for a specific work, it often has priorities. This is why art directors are a thing and the ability to convey narrative is a highly prized quality in professional art directors. Generative AI may product a polished image for you, but that image runs the direct risk of being a liability in other ways - depicting the character as having some important item they do not, depicting something eye-catching that isn't there in the scene, being inconsistent with other illustrations, etc.

Multimedia. Suppose you get your ideal output from AI, it's perfect, somehow you envisioned a scene and typed a prompt - and it just came out perfectly. You've still got to incorporate it into your project, and that means you've got to either shell out for someone to do your graphic design, or acquire the skills yourself. Otherwise you're likely to end up with something like this objectively ugly cover from Laura M Davis's book Nova's Playlist. (It's been review bombed for reasons other than the cover is AI and the layout is an atrocity)

And this is where we run into our catch-22 that sort of prevents AI from actually being helpful here, is that if you take the time to develop decent skills with free software - you can get arguably better, but definitely much more controlled results through royalty free images, stuff that has fallen into public domain, tracing over collages and all kinds of things.

Here's a counter-example cover I mocked up in a few minutes using one royalty free image, GIMP, and spite.

It's more legible, and it fits the premise of the novel better as its about a girl in New York dealing with her life by writing a story about a girl in France, or at least that's the starting setup.... I'm pretty sure not even the author has a clue where it was going. Why? Because I have previously invested a little effort in learning some extremely basic graphic design and prioritized these elements.

Would I go with this? No, I would go with something where I actually invest effort. I would experiment with different ideas, maybe watch a few episodes of "You Suck At PhotoShop" to get ideas what I could do with images available, and work to give myself the best chance of being noticed and having my work considered - and that's kind of my point.

AI illustrations are essentially anti-creativity - they don't help you spread your message the way a photocopier, a tape recorder or a hosting site do - they just invite you to dilute it with tech artifacts that distract from its message. Your book, module, etc is no more readable for having them in there - but it is bloated, more generic and now loaded up with the baggage.

A thing that not enough people talk about, is that slick and polished isn't the be all and end all of art. There is plenty of extremely charming, very rough artwork out there that does the job, makes people happy, etc. There are plenty of unpolished illustrations that have been perfect for purpose - to convey information, to convey mood, to enhance the work. To do all those things that a generative AI program cannot do.

 

[Cergorach]

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.

Writing the read aloud texts for hundreds of dungeon rooms isn't exactly what I would call the 'cool creative stuff'...

People need to realize what they like to do isn't what other people like to do. I just moved and got a huge garden that needs to be kept up. There are people that love their gardening, it's their hobby, it's their passion, it's their creative outlet. For me it's going to be work, possibly work I don't want to do, luckily you can hire experts that do it better and faster then me. If you have a grass field you can buy a robot to mow the grass. When I'm no longer living out of boxes, I'm buying a robot vacuum cleaner! I'm also very happy with my dishwasher, while I grew up with cleaning the dishes by hand. There are already robots doing the work we don't want to, some are more common and cheaper then others. My grandmother grew up doing the washing and dying of clothes by hand...

We've had the uncreative situation of random encounters for 50 years in D&D, and it's still a thing. There are a TON of things in adventure building that are NOT creative or cool. And different people like to do different things.

There are robots that do the burger flipping, but they are expensive, students and unschooled workers tend to be a LOT cheaper then a robot, especially in the short term. But robots building cars, electronics, etc. That's been happening for a LONG time. Pnp RPG writers/illustrators tend to get paid peanuts compared to other branches of entertainment that do writing/illustration professionally. Chances are that paying a freelance writer to produce an adventure is cheaper then running a $25+/month service with a professional prompter. If you have a professional coder $25+/month is peanuts for the additional work they can perform, if they want to (many don't want to).