Kobold Press State of Play Issues “No AI Pledge”

Kobold Press CEO and “Kobold-in-Chief” Wolfgang Baur released a new State of Play post issuing a No AI Pledge. Excerpts from the post (read the full post here):

Both as the Kobold Press CEO and as a game designer, I’m pleased to say that Kobold Press’s policy on AI is simple and direct: We don’t use generative AI art, we don’t use AI to generate text for our game design, and we don’t believe that AI is magical pixie dust that makes your tabletop games better.

[…]

We should be skeptical about AI snake oil. It’s not useless, but it’s also not miraculous. And in some places, it simply doesn’t belong at all.

Your Brain is the Generator

The staff at Kobold Press doesn’t think AI belongs in generating art, roleplaying, or storytelling. Making your game your own is the heart of the RPG hobby: creating your world, your character, and your story with friends. Frankly, we’ve seen LLM text prompts work ok for chatbots. But we play RPGs to play with our friends, not software.

[…]

For game design, we hold the same position. Kobold Press believes in empowering players and game masters with tools (such as the upcoming Encounter Builder tool) that enable your game to run well.

But the emphasis is on your game, not a machine-generated GM or a set of prompts for a design built on LLM training on clear infringement of existing work. The spark of every GM’s creativity doesn’t glow any brighter with AI. None of our game design is generated with AI, and we aim to keep it that way.

The post ends with a sign-up, “If you support Kobold Press in this policy, please feel free to sign below in support.” Since posting on Thursday, over 40 signatures have been added to the statement. This statement comes on the heels of Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks speaking to a Goldan Sach event about the use of “AI” in Dungeons & Dragons last week.

 

[Distracted DM]

I have to wonder if social media had been around would there have been an out cry when Disney used copy machines to do some of the work on 101 Dalmatians instead of human artist?

Possibly, though 101 Dalmatians is a bit more grey since a lot of the folks involved, animators included, liked that their work was being xeroxed because it wasn't being traced for copying (they felt that "life" was lost in the tracing process).

There are many reasons folks might have objections to AI use in products- one being the immoral ways in which they were developed.

 

[aramis erak]

I have to wonder if social media had been around would there have been an out cry when Disney used copy machines to do some of the work on 101 Dalmatians instead of human artist?

There was a union complaint over it. it didn't get far. Attitudes to worker replacement were also different due to the wars (WW I, WW II, Korea)...

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

There are many reasons folks might have objections to AI use in products- one being the immoral ways in which they were developed.

What do you mean by that?

 

[trappedslider]

What do you mean by that?

basically, some feel the way it's trained is illegal/immoral

Here's a document that goes thru each argument and debunks them

https://ai-doc-writer.github.io/ai_guide/

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

basically, some feel the way it's trained is illegal/immoral

Here's a document that goes thru each argument and debunks them

https://ai-doc-writer.github.io/ai_guide/

That is a sort of stream of consciousness nightmare. I can't take any of that seriously. If someone has a cogent argument, they can, you know, present it cogently?

 

[trappedslider]

That is a sort of stream of consciousness nightmare. I can't take any of that seriously. If someone has a cogent argument, they can, you know, present it cogently?

It's mainly bullet points/references to back up counter arguments. IME most if not all of the argument against AI come down to "Big cooperate capitalism is bad"

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

It's mainly bullet points/references to back up counter arguments. IME most if not all of the argument against AI come down to "Big cooperate capitalism is bad"

I get its structure. It's still a nightmare to read through.

How about you distill your arguments against AI into your own words?