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."

 

[Scribe]

Soon enough, AI will be replacing accountants, computer coders, managers, executives, and CEOs.

In that day, the equivalent human counterparts will understand better the angst of the artists today.

I find it highly unlikely that programmers are unaware of the potential.

 

[Jd Smith1]

I, personally, will welcome our robotic overlords.

 

[Oofta]

We gotta be real specific about what we're calling bad, because depending on the exact target, we could be talking past each other real fast.

I think it would be bad if WotC used ChatGPT to write adventures (even if they used some editors/writers to "clean it up."). Sounded like you agreed with that upthread, so I think you have some idea of why that would be a bad thing.


"Generally held to be a good thing" by who? Not by the kids that lost limbs in the gear works, I think. Not by the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Listen to some critical voices and you'll see a galaxy of what might charitably be called compromises (and what might cynically be called inevitable effects of treating people like tools rather than like people).

Writing also isn't an exception. There was opposition to the factory job, and factory jobs literally gave us child labor and gilded age billionaires and The Jungle. The technology of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was opposed by the people who experienced the human cost. The Luddites opposed weaving technology. People opposed agriculture. History keeps trying to teach us the lesson of valuing human beings as human beings and not as tools and we keep not listening.




We might spend the money in part because we collectively believe the relationship between the teacher and the student is important. Like, some of the things I learn from my French teacher is how different people think, different cultural customs, different ways of organizing language and thought. An AI that teaches me "Merci beaucoup!" is not a comparable experience.


It's not special. It's just the specific instance of the general thing that is most relevant to this conversation.

The general thing is thinking of humans in terms of their specific utility to you, instead of as full human beings who are inherently valuable and important by virtue of being people saddled with the same world the rest of us live in.

The specific instance is: Chris Cocks maybe replacing some employees with AI.

Yet before the advances of modern technology, people starved on a regular basis, most children didn't live to see puberty, you had fun times like when the bubonic plague killed 2/3 of the population.

Give me any span of time and I can tell you about terrible things that happened. Ask about practically any revolutionary technology and no matter how much it improved life in the long run, there will be examples of how someone was hurt or lost their job.

Things change. We can't can't stop technology from advancing, nor can we foresee all of the consequences.

 

[Hussar]

/snip
"Generally held to be a good thing" by who? Not by the kids that lost limbs in the gear works, I think. Not by the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Listen to some critical voices and you'll see a galaxy of what might charitably be called compromises (and what might cynically be called inevitable effects of treating people like tools rather than like people).


Writing also isn't an exception. There was opposition to the factory job, and factory jobs literally gave us child labor and gilded age billionaires and The Jungle. The technology of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was opposed by the people who experienced the human cost. The Luddites opposed weaving technology. People opposed agriculture. History keeps trying to teach us the lesson of valuing human beings as human beings and not as tools and we keep not listening.

/snip

Sorry? Technology gave us child labour? Sorry, but, no. Not even a little. It was technology that allowed us to no longer have child labour. That same technology that allowed us to no longer use slaves to produce goods. You think it was technology that gave us wealth disparity?

I kinda like not having 70 or 80% child mortality rates. I kinda like being able to afford food. I kinda like the fact that 90% of the world's population no longer has to farm, mostly on land they are not permitted to own, in order to survive at subsistence levels. I like the fact that as I grow older, and my eyesight is getting worse, I can afford to see a doctor who can prescribe glasses for me that I can wear, all for the price of a couple of hours of labour. Heck, when I had a herniated disk a few years ago, I like the fact that I could go to a hospital, have an MRI, then see a specialist who could fix my back.

Not really buying the idea that technology hasn't made the world an immensely better place than it was. By every possible measure, technology has improved the lives of humanity.

Again, not seeing why writers should be a special case. Or artists for that matter. I empathize. Truly I do. Like I said, my job is going to disappear very soon. It's always been a race, ever since Google Translate hit the public, to see whether I can make retirement before my job vanishes. But me trying to tell everyone to stop using Google Translate, or Deepl, or various LLM systems is ridiculous. It's going to happen. Technology is a part of teaching. It always has been.

We might spend the money in part because we collectively believe the relationship between the teacher and the student is important. Like, some of the things I learn from my French teacher is how different people think, different cultural customs, different ways of organizing language and thought. An AI that teaches me "Merci beaucoup!" is not a comparable experience.

For the overwhelming majority of students? It absolute is a comparable experience. Like I said, language teaching will become a cottage industry like piano teaching. There will always be people like me working in small groups to teach those who are interested enough to pay for a teacher. But public schooling? That's going away. Ten, maybe 15 years from now, those ESL classes that countries like Japan spend billions a year on are not sustainable. Not when you can replace most of the teachers with a tablet and a decent language learning program. Those companies that spend millions of dollars on language training for their workers are going to close those programs down. I see it happening already.

There's an awful lot more to the 2nd Language Learning industry than a public school French Teacher.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

You can't trust 100% translations by AI among other reasons this can't get the word games a the meaning has to be different according the context. This is much more evident when the tone is too colloquial, or when the language is very specialized and technical, using terms that you cannot easily find in a dictionary.

 

[Hussar]

You can't trust 100% translations by AI among other reasons this can't get the word games a the meaning has to be different according the context. This is much more evident when the tone is too colloquial, or when the language is very specialized and technical, using terms that you cannot easily find in a dictionary.

True but like all things it gets better and better over time. To the point where machine translation is typically better than what my students can do on their own.

 

[tetrasodium]

I mean, we can get very specific about what specific models were undermined by what specific labor disputes, but losing sight of the forest for the trees is part of how we keep making this mistake, so lets at least try not to repeat it in this conversation. The forest is: this isn't new or special. This is part of what we go through in every technological change.

You were not making a forest and the trees argument though. All of that talk about Victorian era child labor and the dangers of [dumb] steam powered factory equipment is so far removed from modern discussion of automation that it belongs right down there with concerns about company towns paying in company scrip or the impact of the East India trading company's military forces and privatized Corsairs.

 

[Vaalingrade]

It was technology that allowed us to no longer have child labour.

I wouldn't look too close at where your shoes, clothing, chocolate and the delicious rare earths that enable all our wonderful tech toys come from...

Child labor didn't go away, we just sent it somewhere we can't see it. And now it's making a comeback.

 

[TiQuinn]

I have a feeling that the vast majority of people who are on this message board land somewhere between extreme laissez-faire tech bro and Luddite, so debating whether technology is good or child labor is bad in absolute terms that land one on the extreme ends either way is somewhat pointless.

 

[Charlaquin]

Sorry? Technology gave us child labour? Sorry, but, no. Not even a little. It was technology that allowed us to no longer have child labour. That same technology that allowed us to no longer use slaves to produce goods.

Actually, slavery was mostly not profitable before the invention of the cotton gin, and it’s still very much used to produce a lot of goods.