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

Status
Not open for further replies.
tasha art.jpeg


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."
 

log in or register to remove this ad

Christian Hoffer

Christian Hoffer

“Avrae, be my DM in the style of Brennan Lee Mulligan”.

I wonder what kind of models you could build by training it on thousands of hours of YouTube
I feel like the AI would find a way to crawl out of the computer and throttle you, in the style of Brennan Lee Mulligan
 

log in or register to remove this ad





On this one, non-native speakers have, on average, better grammar and orthography than native ones. And using LLMs for spellchecking is overkill.
Non-native speakers who are fluent in English do generally have good grammar, yes, but not everyone who writes in English is fluent (especially in technical writing). ChatGPT may indeed be overkill but other LLM tools like Grammerly are not.
 

“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.”

I roll to disbelieve.

I also note the double negative followed by a weasel word (“somehow”) which is an indication the speaker knows he’s full of dung.
 

“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.”

I roll to disbelieve.

I also note the double negative followed by a weasel word (“somehow”) which is an indication the speaker knows he’s full of dung.

i was confused by that quote too.

Do 30 or 40 people regularly play with Cocks at the same time?

That sounds like a drastically different Dungeons & Dragons experience than any that I've had. Trying to imagine that doesn't resemble anything like the groups with whom I've gamed over the years.

Surely, he means that he games with multiple groups. But, even then (if we assume 4-5 people per group,) that would mean that somewhere between 8 to 10 groups are "regularly" having sessions involving Cocks.

Even during times I was playing a lot, the most was 2 different ongoing face-to-face groups at the same time while also being in an online play-by-post game. All together, that was 15 people, with significant overlap between two of the groups, so more like 10.

Cocks is saying he's regularly interacting with 40.
 


Human beings can make choices that are different.
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.

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.

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...

If there's one observation I've made in nearly 45 years of gaming is that the best things have come from human imagination and creativity.
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...
 
Last edited:

Status
Not open for further replies.

Trending content

Remove ads

Trending content

Remove ads

Top