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

[SlyFlourish]

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 restructuring our toy and commercial organizations, but that's not affecting Wizards of the Coast. They had some modest impacts, but that was actually mostly kind of in back office related roles. We really prize design talent, art talent, and generally creativity."

Dan Dillon, one of the people laid off in the 2023 Christmas layoff, was a designer, not a back-office role.

On AI:

"And we have to deploy it very, very responsibly and at a measured pace because we gotta make sure that creatives are paid for their work. You know, we're a company that values creativity, and therefore we value creatives. So we're thinking through how do we do this in a way that's ethical, that's responsible, that gives voice actors, gives actors, gives artists, gives writers their fair shake inside of it."

"Generally speaking, in our finished products, everything will be human created and human finished."

"However, when we think about AI enabled tools that kind of bring fun to life, And it enables users to be able to create things. I think we will use our art, we will use our IP, and we will try to use that to create ethically trained art and ethically trained AI tools that kind of bring imaginations to life. You know, if I just look at like my own D&D groups and I play in three different D&D groups, I can't tell you a single person around the table who doesn't use AI in some way, shape, or form to help either craft their character, help inspire an adventure, bring imagery and audio to life."

On the OGL:

Host: "I remember hearing about the open gaming license controversy for Dungeons and Dragons, and there was a lot of debate and a lot of outrage initially about some of the changes you're proposing. But since we're on the topic of, you know, user generated content and Dungeons and Dragons is famous for the amount of participation that gamers actually have in that, talk to us about.
How that controversy, like, what were the lessons learned from that? And how did it all end? Because I think it's been resolved somewhat at this point.

Chris Cocks: "Yeah, I mean, that was about a year and a half ago. And that was a serious case of foot and mouth disease. From our perspective, we did it wrong. And we apologized.

"And I think we quickly made amends. I think where we were coming from [00:46:00] on that whole thing, and the open game license for people who don't know, it was something that was established about 20ish years ago. That basically opens up the rule set and some of the core content for Dungeons and Dragons to create a lingua franca rule set and set of content for people to be able to play tabletop role playing games."

"So what we were trying to do is we were trying to evolve it because a document that was created in 2002 didn't foresee the rise of video games. It didn't foresee the rise of AI tools. It didn't foresee even things like content streaming. So our goal there was to try to protect an end user's ability to be able to make content and have fun and a creator's ability to create content and be able to make a living off of it while preventing kind of like a quick serve restaurant from using the D&D brand to sell tacos or a big video game company to be able to create a video game using the IP in a way that wasn't fair to us as the kind of quote unquote brand owners, or maybe do something that we didn't necessarily like with the brand or had content that was inappropriate."

"Which happens in, when you have tens of millions of users making content, I think we found a fair and equitable solution to it. You know, if anything, we embraced open source even more."

Definitely some revisionist history in there. The OGL didn't allow anyone to use the D&D brand. It also began in 2002 but it was re-used for 5e in 2016, well into the huge rise of video games. Anyway, whatever, it's in the CC now =D

On Monopoly Go, Chris Cocks doesn't mention the half-billion dollars in advertisement that went into Monopoly Go. If you were on Facebook (thank the gods I wasn't) you were pelted with ads for Monopoly Go.

It also fails to mention that the company making Monopoly Go is a subsidiary of the Saudi Public Investment Fund. Yes, the mobile game "Monopoly Go" is actually funded by the third-biggest oil-producing country in the world and an actual kingdom at that!

 

[Ruin Explorer]

You know, if I just look at like my own D&D groups and I play in three different D&D groups, I can't tell you a single person around the table who doesn't use AI in some way, shape, or form to help either craft their character, help inspire an adventure, bring imagery and audio to life.

He's telling us so much more about how narrow and specific his social circle is there, than about D&D players or groups in general. Always amazing when people try to give evidence of how they are "hip to the scene" and prove the exact opposite. Cue a bunch of middle-aged middle/upper-middle (by income) class American white men telling me how they're seeing the same lol.

They had some modest impacts, but that was actually mostly kind of in back office related roles. We really prize design talent, art talent, and generally creativity.

Jesus lol. What a crock. I mean, fire who you like but don't give us this kind of dreadful gross spin. (I am aware this is Cocks not Dillon.) AFAIK the vast majority of their actual creatives are contractors rather than permanent employees, really the valuing the absolute hell out of them there lol.

Definitely some revisionist history in there.

Yeah that's quote notable revisionism/lying. EDIT - Cocks really Cocks-ing here. This is pretty dreadful.

 

[Scribe]

The OGL didn't allow anyone to use the D&D brand.

In his eyes, the SRD is quite clearly the D&D brand, since they have done such an abysmal job of actually elevating the D&D brand into something that was (pre-2024 Edition) recognizable as "D&D" and not, "Generic Fantasy."

Pathfinder 1, has a stronger brand identity, than pre-2024 D&D.

 

[Shardstone]

I hate how he talked about the OGL. That was such two-faced revisionist nonsense. Very disappointing to see.

 

[Vaalingrade]

You know, if I just look at like my own D&D groups and I play in three different D&D groups, I can't tell you a single person around the table who doesn't use AI in some way, shape, or form to help either craft their character, help inspire an adventure, bring imagery and audio to life.

You lie down with tech bros, you wake up with NFTs.

 

[CleverNickName]

That "however" qualifier he gave with respect to AI was not reassuring. I was giving my computer some serious side-eye.

 

[Morrus]

You know, if I just look at like my own D&D groups and I play in three different D&D groups, I can't tell you a single person around the table who doesn't use AI in some way, shape, or form to help either craft their character, help inspire an adventure, bring imagery and audio to life.

Oh... wow.

I'm also in 3 different TTRPG groups (one is a weekly D&D group, one is my regular weekly group who is currently playing A5E--Voidrunner, specifially, right now, and one is a revolving TTRPG group at a game club with members who come and go) and to my knowledge not one person has used AI.

This points to a fundamentally different experience. Cocks has, what, 3x5=15 people in his immediate groups who use AI. And I have 0x5=0 people. And, naturally, Cocks will make decisions based on his experience, not mine.

 

[Alzrius]

"And we have to deploy it very, very responsibly and at a measured pace because we gotta make sure that creatives are paid for their work. You know, we're a company that values creativity, and therefore we value creatives. So we're thinking through how do we do this in a way that's ethical, that's responsible, that gives voice actors, gives actors, gives artists, gives writers their fair shake inside of it."

"Generally speaking, in our finished products, everything will be human created and human finished."

"However, when we think about AI enabled tools that kind of bring fun to life, And it enables users to be able to create things. I think we will use our art, we will use our IP, and we will try to use that to create ethically trained art and ethically trained AI tools that kind of bring imaginations to life. You know, if I just look at like my own D&D groups and I play in three different D&D groups, I can't tell you a single person around the table who doesn't use AI in some way, shape, or form to help either craft their character, help inspire an adventure, bring imagery and audio to life."

So nothing about how their new Principle AI Engineer job will include having AI generate "NPC behaviors"? Because that sounds a lot like AI DMs to me, which sounds like what a company does if they want to cut out the creatives rather than value them.

 

[Yaarel]

Probably mention Mike Mearls, a lead designer, who is no longer with WotC.

 

[Yaarel]

On AI:

It looks like the approach is to avoid AI for official content, but welcome AI for player-generated content.

Hypothetically, this might be ok.