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

[M.T. Black]

Does that need AI? I can do that with random generators now.

What sort of non-AI random generator creates an image? Or do you mean pulling a random image from a pre-drawn pool of images?

 

[Morrus]

What sort of non-AI random generator creates an image? Or do you mean pulling a random image from a pre-drawn pool of images?

I was more thinking about the backstory part. Yeah, images are more difficult!

 

[tetrasodium]

Does that need AI? I can do that with random generators now.

It depends on how it gets done. A common method that video games have done since somewhere in the 90's☆is to divide the faces up into strips along these lines
hair
forehead
eyes & maybe part or all of nose
nose
mouth
chin
From there the player can mix & match those bits from the available faces with bits from other available faces. AI generated faces is a very different can of worms though

☆I'm sure it could have been done earlier before 3dcards became standard & powerful enough to matter without damaging the gameplay for fluff, but storage was at too much of a premium & graphics tended to be too crude for much more than choosing what colors are used by things like skin/hair/outfit/maybe eyes

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I read the Chris Cocks quote on the OGL mess a few times.

I know very few people will be happy with it. But it's actually a lot better than the usual "Mistakes were made," corporate speak.

He broke it down fairly well:

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.

Started with acknowledging that it was an error, and that they apologized. Okay, the "We" is mealy-mouthed, but still. "We were wrong, we are sorry," is actually unusual for corporations.

And I think we quickly made amends. I think where we were coming from 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.

Then moves to an explanation as to what the OGL is. Okay.

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.

This is probably the best explanation from their point of view. Worried about making money from the brand, or that people would damage the brand. The one thing that isn't said? Monetizing the brand. Which ... yep. As for AI tools? I think that was just thrown in there because AI is a thing now.


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.

Weird segue, but ended by correctly saying that in the end, they went with an even better open source model. Although I don't think that they were all willingly embracing it, but you have to put some spin on it.


Overall, not that bad. I think there are a lot of people that won't be satisfied until he says, "It was all my fault because I'm a bad man and I am going to wear a hair shirt," but that's not going to happen.

 

[bedir than]

What sort of non-AI random generator creates an image?

Procedural creations, rather than LLM

https://www.dmheroes.com/

 

[Vaalingrade]

Yeah, we had image generators that assembled images from a bank of elements that didn't call themselves AI just like we had chatbots and autocorrect that didn't call itself AI.

Heroforge has a random button for example and I think certain versions can be tuned.

 

[Alzrius]

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."

You may be right, though I'm still tempted to believe that for all the press about him being the "Gamer-in-Chief" of Hasbro, Cocks simply doesn't understand what the OGL is or how it works.

But what irked me was the part where he said "if anything, we embraced open source even more."

Um, no. You didn't.

I know I'm almost totally alone in my take on this, but the CC-BY-4.0 is not more open source than the OGL simply because that particular CC doesn't mandate that new content must be open itself. I know that some people say CC-BY-4.0 is more open because they define "open source" as "what gives the creator(s) the most choice (about what/how much to release)" but my take on it is that "open source" means "what makes the most amount of material available to the community (with the fewest restrictions or limitations)." The OGL created a "virtuous circle" much more than the CC-BY-4.0 does, and the latter makes for a weaker open source community.

 

[Lidgar]

Everyone he games with uses AI? Does he only game in Redmond?

 

[SlyFlourish]

I was more thinking about the backstory part. Yeah, images are more difficult!

I was pretty happy with the huge array of portraits available on D&D Beyond. They have a ton of artwork they could simply use as is to supply thousands of character portraits without taking the work of their artists and feeding it into a hungry hungry LLM.

 

[SlyFlourish]

You may be right, though I'm still tempted to believe that for all the press about him being the "Gamer-in-Chief" of Hasbro, Cocks simply doesn't understand what the OGL is or how it works.

But what irked me was the part where he said "if anything, we embraced open source even more."

Um, no. You didn't.

I know I'm almost totally alone in my take on this, but the CC-BY-4.0 is not more open source than the OGL simply because that particular CC doesn't mandate that new content must be open itself. I know that some people say CC-BY-4.0 is more open because they define "open source" as "what gives the creator(s) the most choice (about what/how much to release)" but my take on it is that "open source" means "what makes the most amount of material available to the community (with the fewest restrictions or limitations)." The OGL created a "virtuous circle" much more than the CC-BY-4.0 does, and the latter makes for a weaker open source community.

This is definitely a big conversation in the opensource software world as well. I'm on the side that a CC BY 4.0 license is the more open license because it allows people to publish material and decide what they want to put in the open. The more OGL-style licenses don't and actually benefit the top of the food chain more than the bottom.

If WOTC had released it under a Share Alike license, they could have held back their own stuff from the SRD but force every downstream publisher to release everything under a share-alike license which would mean WOTC could use anything you created under that license but could hold their own stuff back by not putting it in a system reference document. It would have been unlikely they would have brought in stuff from downstream producers but I guarantee many people would have been suspicious of them.

I'm much happier that it's out under a CC BY 4.0 license as I'm happy that Russ put out the A5e SRD under the same license. It is much friendlier to downstream producers.