Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks Talks AI Usage in D&D [UPDATED!]

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Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks is convinced that the Dungeons & Dragons franchise will support some kind of AI usage in the future. Speaking today at a Goldman Sachs event, Cocks spoke about how AI products could soon support Dungeons & Dragons and other Hasbro brands. Asked about whether AI has the potential to "bend the cost curve" in terms of entertainment development or digital gaming, and how it's being used in the toy and content industries, Cocks said the following:

"Inside of development, we've already been using AI. It's mostly machine-learning-based AI or proprietary AI as opposed to a ChatGPT approach. We will deploy it significantly and liberally internally as both a knowledge worker aid and as a development aid. I'm probably more excited though about the playful elements of AI. If you look at a typical D&D player....I play with probably 30 or 40 people regularly. There's not a single person who doesn't use AI somehow for either campaign development or character development or story ideas. That's a clear signal that we need to be embracing it. We need to do it carefully, we need to do it responsibly, we need to make sure we pay creators for their work, and we need to make sure we're clear when something is AI-generated. But the themes around using AI to enable user-generated content, using AI to streamline new player introduction, using AI for emergent storytelling, I think you're going to see that not just our hardcore brands like D&D but also multiple of our brands."


Wizards of the Coast representatives has repeatedly said that Dungeons & Dragons is a game made by people for people, as multiple AI controversies has surrounded the brand and its parent company. Wizards updated its freelance contracts to explicitly prohibit use of AI and has pulled down AI-generated artwork that was submitted for Bigby's Presents: Glory of the Giants in 2023 after they learned it was made using AI tools.

A FAQ related to AI specifically notes that "Hasbro has a vast portfolio of 1900+ brands of which Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons are two – two very important, cherished brands. Each brand is going to approach its products differently. What is in the best interest of Trivial Pursuit is likely quite different than that of Magic: The Gathering or Dungeons & Dragons." This statement acknowledges that Hasbro may use AI for other brands, while also stating that Wizards is trying to keep AI-generated artwork away from the game. However, while Wizards seems to want to keep AI away from D&D and Magic, their parent company's CEO seems to think that AI and D&D aren't naturally opposed.


UPDATE -- Greg Tito, who was WotC's communications director until recently, commented on BlueSky: "I'm deeply mistrustful of AI and don't want people using it anywhere near my D&D campaigns."
 

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Christian Hoffer

Christian Hoffer


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I don't know where the 30-40 number comes from, but at one point I may have been playing with that many. When I was heavily involved with RPGA public games, I played and DMed with a lot of people in separate game days. I could also throw in gaming conventions, often in other cities.

Not saying that it's relevant to what Chris said or that I would have had any clue about something like use of AI, just that the number isn't completely unrealistic.

Perhaps they have internal playtesting groups and he just bounces around. Maybe a lot of them are online and he just pops in to do a session here and there. Maybe he's talking about games with that many people over a year.

Or not. I'm just saying that playing with that many people is not completely unrealistic. 🤷
 

Of those 30 to 40, how many are WotC employees, at in-house functions?
I would think that likely just because he’s a CEO of a company that owns games. It’s great that he plays whether it’s because he enjoys it or as a way to keep in touch with employees or the games they make. What I think struck me as bogus, was using that perspective as rationalization (self-serving or otherwise) for how normal players interact with the game.
 

The AI could be good to create faster but not to be original and to can cause surprise with some plot twist. And the AI art could need "LoRA"s, a special type of file, and these need a lot of time to be created.

A human DM is better but this could be helped by AI in a way like the threater promter and assistant

I found in youtube a channel, Deadmanfred, where the streamer has started to DM with four AI players.


I imagine in the future actual-play shows where the DM is the only human and a pure sadic, in some horror+comedy where the PCs are cute and innocent magical girls... and they suffer a lot. What if the AI players fail? That is the fun part. It is not about how they are going to survive, but if they are going to die by fault of some stupid mistake. Or the bard AI PC could try to date all the female characters but he recieves the most humilliating answers, because the DM is cruel and he wants to see them suffering.

Who would dare to produce actual-play shows with AI players? Software companies to show the AI developed by them.

Other option could be a mixture of AI+Human players. How? The human could be somebody who knows nothing and the AI controls all, but somethings the AI ask what next action to be done among a mini-list as if it was a gamebook game. If the human player wants, she controll all the actions, and she can choose the automatic mode, controlled by the AI, for example in the fights where there rules are more complex.
 

For example: ChatGPT produces (imho) better texts then the D&D writers.
Only if Justin LaNasa is the human writer...

ChatCPT is riddled with errors and continuity issues. It also likes to repeat the same adjectives over and over and over.
And do you have 45 years of AI (generative and LLM) experience with the current generation of tools to compare it to? No. That's because in the last 45 years human 'creativity' hasn't really advanced and in that same period AI (generative and LLM) has advanced drastically.

The best things in 45 years of gaming have come from humans, because in that period of time it's been only humans that did the doing. Even now it's humans giving the prompts...
Forget the past 45 years then. In the past year, the stuff I've seen kids come up with far outshines the things AI comes up with. Largely because AI has no imagination. It can't. It's a scraping system. Your argument is fundamentally flawed and misses the point.
 

To me, much of the problem with Mr. Cocks' statements is that he doesn't really talk about what he wants to use AI for.

If he wants to use AI to make new game supplements? He can take a hike.

If he wants to use AI trained on WotC published material to support new randomly generated dungeons? You know, knock yourself out!
 

To me, much of the problem with Mr. Cocks' statements is that he doesn't really talk about what he wants to use AI for.

If he wants to use AI to make new game supplements? He can take a hike.

If he wants to use AI trained on WotC published material to support new randomly generated dungeons? You know, knock yourself out!
This is the crux of the matter, Mr Cocks has make a number of statements that do not amount to a hill of means. They commit him to nothing. It is mostly others taking the worst possible readings of these words that is creating the fear.
Most of his statements amount to we're looking into the possibilities and making some use of AI tools.
 

To me, much of the problem with Mr. Cocks' statements is that he doesn't really talk about what he wants to use AI for.

If he wants to use AI to make new game supplements? He can take a hike.

If he wants to use AI trained on WotC published material to support new randomly generated dungeons? You know, knock yourself out!

It sounded like he wanted to use AI to help his creative talent in various ways.
 

But they generally don't do that... Ever. The amount of actual 'creative' people is extremely low, we might have higher percentage of that in pnp RPGs, but it's still a very small percentage to be significant. There's a reason for tropes... And even the folks actually writing the 'mainstream' pnp RPGs either aren't writing/drawing creatively or aren't that creative in the first place. I'll point out the last 50 years of D&D books. Sure, there are creative and artistic pnp RPGs out there, but they aren't mainstream and never will be. Because most people like the familiar. Familiar illustrations, familiar writing, familiar concepts.
There's a lot of unfounded assumptions in these sentences that you should deeply question.

AI (generative and LLM) are tools. When was the last time your hammer build you a closet? Humans direct/use tools, that's our nature. AI (generative and LLM) is not some magical thingy that certainly does xyz without any human interference. It's still humans at the start and end of the process, often also at many points in the middle.

The question that got Cocks talking was about bending a cost curve. IE: reducing the development budget. IE: using fewer people to produce more things.

If you don't imagine that a key reason investors are trying to hype up AI is that they imagine that it can replace paid human effort, you're not paying attention.

For example: ChatGPT produces (imho) better texts then the D&D writers. And the D&D writers generally produce better texts then the average DM. Earlier this week our DM gave me some text to push through my text-to-speech software, I asked ChatGPT to rewrite it (that was mostly because I wanted something a little more verbose for better results in the software). What we got back was more cinematic, but some of the specific wording was too specific. In this case the DM changed that part and kept the rest, he could also have chose to keep what he had written himself. All human choices, while still using AI (generative and LLM) tools. I'm horrible at drawing straight lines, I use a ruler for that...

None of that has much to do with using AI to MAKE D&D stuff, which Cocks is saying is already happening.

Remember that the Luddites didn't have a problem with technology. They had a problem with not being able to afford food. The problem with AI isn't "RRRGH TOOL BAD!" It's the use the tool is being put to by investors and CEO's. It's that "bending the cost curve using AI" is an unintentional euphemism for laying people off. Jobs making things that will no longer exist because AI can do it well enough and doesn't need to pay rent. The objection isn't that the tool is inherently wicked. It's that human beings are not horses in the age of the combustion engine, and a lot of the people high on AI hype care more about a cost curve than they do about making sure Hasbro employees can buy a house and raise a family and save for retirement.

And that's a pretty screwed up set of priorities, tbh.
 

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