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

Chris Cocks spoke about AI and D&D at a Goldman Sachs event.

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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

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Vaalingrade

Legend
I never heard that it was solved. Just relocated.
I mean the crux of the argument here is that technological innovation solved child labor.

This being said without asking who is mining all the delicious tantilum required for all the Machine Learning Cores we're putting in our phones so they can hallucinate answers to questions we used to be able to Google and steal from content creators.
 

I think you need to ask "what were those children doing before they became 'our' child labour?" and it was not, not labouring. That is not to say that we should not call out companies that benefit from child labour and help increase worker protection and environmental standards worldwide. If only because the exploitation of workers abroad creates leverage to exploit workers at home.
It is not a simple nor straight forward issue though and things are much improved over the past practises in this regards.

This is similar to one of the biggest drives of tension with respect to the AI issue. AI will take capital (as in mucho dinero) to deploy and the interests of the holders of that capital does not necessarily align with the rest of the peons labouring at the coalface.
The older I get, the less straightforward thing become. Before I retired, I initiated and commanded several Human Trafficking crackdowns. We put violators in jail, eventually prison, and shipped victims home. The unsettling part of the business, was that the victims were more upset than the violators.
 

I mean the crux of the argument here is that technological innovation solved child labor.

This being said without asking who is mining all the delicious tantilum required for all the Machine Learning Cores we're putting in our phones so they can hallucinate answers to questions we used to be able to Google and steal from content creators.
I see.

I would describe it as 'take business from' rather than 'steal'. Technology is often a double-edged sword.
 


I don't believe him, period. Play with 30-40 people regularly? And he's a a CEO?
I also find it hard to believe, Cocks is probably exaggerating. But it would be cool if it was true wouldn't it? That the CEO of D&D likes the game so much that he finds time to play in 5-6 campaigns simultaneously. :geek:
 

I'm A Banana

Potassium-Rich
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.
Yeah, things change. This isn't new. This isn't exceptional.

And also, when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash.

The people who are worried about what AI will do to human beings aren't wrong to be worried, they aren't making things up. People have been hurt by every major technological change.

So what are we going to do about that?

I don't think the useful thing here is to try and prevent the change. The useful thing is to protect the victims of that change from the suffering that change will bring. To not repeat the mistakes of earlier eras (which we keep repeating, and are likely repeating here with AI). When you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash. That's not a reason to stop the plane from being invented, but it is a pretty good reason to, say, tightly regulate the airline industry and ensure airplane manufacturers aren't cutting corners on safety to make a quick buck (BOEING). In a way we aren't doing with AI.

Here in our own little corner, the scope is reasonably limited, but we can, at the very least, point out that when someone asks Chris Cocks about "bending the cost curve," they're asking in part about replacing people with AI, and that this is bad for these people.

You think it was technology that gave us wealth disparity?

I mean, in specific, there's credible historical evidence that agricultural technologies created humanity's first significant wealth disparities (you don't get empires and slave labor and king-priests and such without some pretty serious farming that allows you to feed a vast population of people who don't farm).

But the broader point is just that significant technological change causes problems. And so far, the people who benefit from the change largely wash their hands of the concern for the people who are crushed under the change. We don't need to repeat that mistake.

"So WotC creates their next adventure with ChatGPT, what's so bad about that?"

Well, so a technology makes some people suffer. That's what's so bad about that.

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.

What's bad about this isn't really the technology. Change happens. It's the suffering. That's the thing that we could choose to address.

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.

This is a good example of the talking past each other.

Just because it's going away does not mean it's a comparable experience. Just because there's an economic momentum does not mean that momentum is leading to a good outcome for people in general, or for these people in specific.

School is not just an output factory for skills. And if we treat it that way, we're going to create more suffering, as we treat people more like machines and less like people.
 

Oofta

Legend
Supporter
I also find it hard to believe, Cocks is probably exaggerating. But it would be cool if it was true wouldn't it? That the CEO of D&D likes the game so much that he finds time to play in 5-6 campaigns simultaneously. :geek:
Or he's involved in a rotating set of games like AL where there is no "campaign", you just play modules.
 

Sorry, this may be a little off-topic.

Technology can be used for a better future or to cause damage and suffering. Sci-fi shows a lot of examples of how technology could be used in the wrong way. Do you remember the teleserie "Black Mirror"?

* And AI is not so good when you want pictures with certain details, for example character A in the middle, B fighting against C in a square, and in the other side D and E hugging and kissing.

The things in the next ten or twenty years can be different, in the same way the videoconsoles in the current days aren't like decades ago. The videogames of the movies of Harry Potter are one of the best examples to show the evolution.

* Could AI be used to create a mash-up setting merging Dragonlance and Dark Sun?

* Even if AI could create true wonders, AI with help by humans should can do it better.
 

Oofta

Legend
Supporter
Yeah, things change. This isn't new. This isn't exceptional.

And also, when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash.

The people who are worried about what AI will do to human beings aren't wrong to be worried, they aren't making things up. People have been hurt by every major technological change.

So what are we going to do about that?

I don't think the useful thing here is to try and prevent the change. The useful thing is to protect the victims of that change from the suffering that change will bring. To not repeat the mistakes of earlier eras (which we keep repeating, and are likely repeating here with AI). When you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash. That's not a reason to stop the plane from being invented, but it is a pretty good reason to, say, tightly regulate the airline industry and ensure airplane manufacturers aren't cutting corners on safety to make a quick buck (BOEING). In a way we aren't doing with AI.

Here in our own little corner, the scope is reasonably limited, but we can, at the very least, point out that when someone asks Chris Cocks about "bending the cost curve," they're asking in part about replacing people with AI, and that this is bad for these people.



I mean, in specific, there's credible historical evidence that agricultural technologies created humanity's first significant wealth disparities (you don't get empires and slave labor and king-priests and such without some pretty serious farming that allows you to feed a vast population of people who don't farm).

But the broader point is just that significant technological change causes problems. And so far, the people who benefit from the change largely wash their hands of the concern for the people who are crushed under the change. We don't need to repeat that mistake.

"So WotC creates their next adventure with ChatGPT, what's so bad about that?"

Well, so a technology makes some people suffer. That's what's so bad about that.



What's bad about this isn't really the technology. Change happens. It's the suffering. That's the thing that we could choose to address.



This is a good example of the talking past each other.

Just because it's going away does not mean it's a comparable experience. Just because there's an economic momentum does not mean that momentum is leading to a good outcome for people in general, or for these people in specific.

School is not just an output factory for skills. And if we treat it that way, we're going to create more suffering, as we treat people more like machines and less like people.

I don't think we really make much of a difference in corporate direction, at least not on a topic like this. If there's much of anything to the talk to begin with, which I also doubt.

I think a lot of people exaggerate the potential of our current AI direction. ChatGPT (GPT stands for Generative pre-trained transformer) works by making connections between words and then figures out how to mimic what it was fed by following those same patterns. But it's gotten as good as it has on the transformation piece because of all the pre-training it's had. Except that training is data and text they hoovered up from the internet. There's not really anything left to train it on and they may be facing a dead end sooner rather than later.

It's like people looking at how fast a baby grows in the first year or two and extrapolating out that in 5 years they're going to be 20 foot tall. AI can be an aid, I doubt it will ever be a replacement. At least not with the current models and not in the foreseeable future.
 

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