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

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.

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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."

 

[Superchunk77]

Or, Chris, it's a sign that you game with tech bros.

I game with about half as many people as you do, and one player uses Stable Diffusion to create game art of his character.

Same with me. Out of my gamer friends, which number about 10 in total, I know of maybe 1 or 2 that fart around with AI stuff, but AFAIK they don't use it in-game.

 

[Superchunk77]

That’s really disappointing, but par for the course for WotC and Hasbro.

Wasn't hard for me to see this coming. WotC may be anti-AI, but big brother Hasbro holds their leash.

 

[Jared Rascher]

Gotta love that, with the AI bubble showing signs of bursting, Cox had to make sure to kill some more goodwill on the topic before it's gone.

 

[schneeland]

Or, Chris, it's a sign that you game with tech bros.

I game with about half as many people as you do, and one player uses Stable Diffusion to create game art of his character.

I was thinking the same - for me it's a bit more (about 1/5 of the people), and I also got the feeling that the big hype is already over and while some people keep using generative AI, most people have either not picked it up at all or stopped using it after a while.

Side note: I do wonder if he mention this at an earlier event already. Somehow I feel I have read that statement about the 30-40 AI-using players before.

 

[Lidgar]

I’m surprised by the 30 or 40 players and all have used AI for character development in some shape or form. Must be different socio-economic level of players, or time strapped, in that group cause none of our group have “played” with AI for anything with their many characters…or art or story elements.

I’m convinced he only games with employees from a certain software company out of Redmond.

Not one of my group of 10 or so players (two groups) uses AI. Heck, most of us game because we want to express creativity, not look for shortcuts. But to each their own.

 

[RangerWickett]

Or, Chris, it's a sign that you game with tech bros.

I game with about half as many people as you do, and one player uses Stable Diffusion to create game art of his character.

I was playing in a jokey game, and I made an absolute Drizzt knock-off, then used ChatGPT to create prompts like, "In the style of novelist R.A. Salvatore, what would a hero who fights with two scimitars say to a witch as he was attacking?"

The point was to be derivative, not creative. We had some chuckles. But it got boring after the third time I 'pledged to kiss her throat with the icy steel of my cunning blades' or whatever.

In a Star Wars game, we occasionally would hit up an image generator with some dumb joke we'd made, like this Gungan drug dealer inspired by Hunter S. Thompson.

Maybe the only genuinely useful situation was when I was running a murder mystery set in the Legend of the Five Rings setting of Rokugan. I had a cast of like 13 people, and I used Bing's Image Generator to make some NPC portraits so the party could keep people straight. I could have just used art from the card game, surely. If I ever turned that into a published adventure, I would definitely pay artists instead of using generated images - both for ethical reasons, and because the generated images were pretty clumsy. Like, no, this is not how any real samurai would look:

And that's in a genre that's very popular with tons of art for it. I'm currently running a bronze age game, inspired by Babylon and Sumeria, and wouldn't you know it? Image generators SUUUUCK at that era. They haven't been trained enough. There's not much art based on that time, but what exists is, y'know, genuinely neat. Here's a garment called a kaunakes (illustrated by Tadarida on DeviantArt).

And here's Bing image generator's best attempt at a kaunakes:

One time I even tried training ChatGPT with a list of characters in that bronze age campaign, and some of their motivations, and asked it to come up with plots or adventure hooks, and it made some drivel that wholly misunderstood the narrative and the setting. It just wanted them to go to a dungeon to find long lost treasure and I'm like, my digital dude, civilization's like a week old. There ain't enough treasure to have gotten lost yet!

Now, when it comes to corporate use of AI, what I could tolerate is, like, "Hey DND Bot, here are monster stats. Please examine them and flag anything that looks like it is unbalanced for the challenge rating or that has typos."

But the actual creation of content needs to be done by people who have a real brain.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

MUTANT BUNNY SAMURAI!

Also, Trinity sure looks miserable in that still from the next Matrix movie.

 

[Oofta]

I'll believe they're doing much with AI when I see it.

 

[Argyle King]

Get as many people as you can on DDB and a VTT; have some manner of TOS (like Facebook has) that says the platform owner owns rights to your created content; train the AI on crowdsourced content...

Fewer writers and content designers needed. You'd just need a project overseer and maybe an editor to clean up oddities created by AI's (lack of) natural language skill.

 

[gban007]

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.

Feels quite similar to comments in below thread:

D&D General - Interview with Chris Cocks on D&D AI, the OGL, and more

Chris Cocks was interviewed on the Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast. The D&D stuff largely starts at the 40 minute mark. I'm attaching a machine-generated transcription if you'd prefer to read it. Here are some tasty quotes: On layoffs: "we are going through a series of layoffs as part of...

www.enworld.org

Regarding the FAQ though - the FAQ is in terms of AI Art, and I think they've been pretty clear / consistent that won't use AI art, but that they may use AI for other areas for D&D.