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.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Video games without good to great AI are trash especially RPG games and sports games.

I don't think Kobold Press is talking about how a digital quarterback decides what to do with a digital football.

 

[jerryrice4949]

I don't think Kobold Press is talking about how a digital quarterback decides what to do with a digital football.

Fair enough but Chris Cocks could have been referencing video games in development for Hasbro when discussing their plans for AI previously.

 

[Abstruse]

Video game AI is completely different from the algorithmic generation called "AI".

One is a series of basic coding that decides when a video game character not controlled by the player does stuff. It's been used in video games since there have been single-player game options.

The other uses "machine learning" and LLMs (Large Language Models) via generative algorithms and extensive databases of source material to draw from in order to "create" "new" material mixing and matching existing work by predicting what the person wants based on the given prompt and previous iterations of "training". And yes, I'm using a lot of quotes because I don't agree with the way the terms are used - especially "AI" - but they're the industry standard terms so that's what I'm forced to use to talk about them.

When people are talking about "AI" right now, they're almost never talking about the "the code that makes Nick Valentine constantly go hunting for a nuke launcher to pick up and blast me to oblivion in Fallout 4". They're talking about generative algorithms like ChatGPT, Midjourney, etc.

Attempting to conflate video game NPC AI with LLMs and algorithmic generation is intentionally muddying the subject to create confusion.

 

[Scribe]

Fair enough but Chris Cocks could have been referencing video games in development for Hasbro when discussing their plans for AI previously.

No, he was reference 'bending the cost curve'.

That only means one thing.

 

[mamba]

AI is necessary for some areas. Wouldn’t we expect Hasbro to use AI in video game development? AI is always made out to be so bad but that is a gross over simplification.

we managed just fine without it for the last 2000 years, so calling it necessary seems to be an overstatement

 

[mamba]

Video games without good to great AI are trash especially RPG games and sports games.

that is not an AI in the sense that is being discussed here

 

[mamba]

Fair enough but Chris Cocks could have been referencing video games in development for Hasbro when discussing their plans for AI previously.

no, that is not what Cocks was talking about, at all... he might as well have been talking about Artificial Insemination as AI

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

no, that is not what Cocks was talking about, at all... he might as well have been talking about Artificial Insemination as AI

To be fair, there's a whole constituency out there for such content in D&D.

 

[EthanSental]

85 sign ups as of 745pm Friday 9/20. Was this sent out via email notices to people signed up with Kobold press as I didn’t see if it was.

 

[Anon Adderlan]

Cox is clear he's not up on the law, since he talks about WotC owning the copyrights on the art in quotes from a third party - when the US Copyright Registrar has said the product of generative AI is not protectable content.
Note that as an IP holding US Corporation, that's dispositive and prevents Hasbro from holding Copyrights on AI generated content.
If it's true that there's AI content, Cox just nutted HasBro's IPs. At the very least, risking loss of copyright protection on potentially large chunks of content and/or fraud charges for failure to denote what elements are AI Generated.

AI and Copyright Law in 2023: Federal Government Activities

2023 was an extremely busy year for artificial intelligence (AI). That was especially true for copyright issues related to AI, which sparked several Congressional hearings, a study by the U.S. Copyright Office, and other government

copyrightalliance.org

Yeah, that’s likely going to change in the cases where an AI is trained entirely on content you have a right to, because precedent established you don’t lose copyright to your work by modifying it with an algorithm. Otherwise you’d lose it the minute you applied any kind of filter to it.

And honestly who cares if #Hasbro owns the content their AI creates? Because it’s generated on demand, only relevant in the moment, and never going to be resold. And why bother enforcing copyright when simply generating more content is far easier and ultimately more profitable?