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

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."

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

Im going to fight the fight against AI even if I know I will lose.

Still not convinced it's the losing side, and it absolutely is not the wrong one.

 

[I'm A Banana]

This isn’t surprising and not necessarily as bad as people will make it out to be. Every industry is experimenting with AI.

When "every industry" is doing something, that's suspicious. What do industries as diverse as healthcare and toy making have in common?

Well, one big thing: wealthy investors.

That doesn't mean generative AI can't also be useful in certain contexts. It does mean that the cart is before the horse. The fixation - especially from groups like Goldman "We'll take your taxpayers' money and pay our execs millions of dollars in a year where we helped precipitate a worldwide financial crisis" Sachs - is on finding uses and excuses for using AI (and legends and myths and misunderstandings about AI), rather than on finding organic ways in which generative AI can be useful. Goldman isn't interested in AI or D&D, it's interested in money.

To Cook's credit, it sounds like he's got a better orientation than most CEO's. He's aware of some of the threats, and he's more cautious than many I've seen. But he's also at a Goldman Sachs event, telling wealthy investors what they want to hear, regardless of how much of an empty fart it is, regardless of the problems that their little pet money-making scheme might cause.

 

[Charlaquin]

Like most new technologies AI may be beneficial, disastrous, both of those or neither (total bust). I don’t know. I mean there is a lot of alarmism. People had similar feelings about the internet- I guess the jury is still out on that too .

The energy cost is truly outrageous. If AI becomes as prevalent as the tech bros hope for, and we don’t make truly revolutionary changes to energy production methods worldwide, it will absolutely be ecologically disastrous.

 

[Blue]

The energy cost is truly outrageous. If AI becomes as prevalent as the tech bros hope for, and we don’t make truly revolutionary changes to energy production methods worldwide, it will absolutely be ecologically disastrous.

This dovetails nicely into something I was about to say.

The "AI" that people are talking about are great at patterns. You may have heard of weather forecasts like the "European Mid Range Model (ECMWF)" or others. These run on supercomputers to predict what's coming next. Well, they've trained models against our weather records, and have a pretty amazing forecast ability except for truly novel weather situations - at a small fraction of the compute power and time as the weather prediction models.

In other words, these save a lot of power over what is being done now, and produce results faster.

What we see in our face the most are things like AI generative art or ChatGPT, but there are a lot of other places this technology can and will be a big benefit.

And if that leads in 10 years to buying a digital adventure path and it has the basics and automatically customizes it to who the characters are and what your party is doing, based on what half a million other DMs are doing with it plus a rich catelog of public domain books, I can see that coming.

 

[GiantBrainStudio]

Or, Chris, it's a sign that you game with tech bros.

I game with about half as many people as you do, and one player uses Stable Diffusion to create game art of his character.

I play with about 30 to 40 people. I'm also a CEO of a company. GTFOH!

 

[Vaalingrade]

That's... not ever going to happen.

Generative AI has a number of very real and very dire limitations )system collapse, data source limitations, the black box nature of the generation process that means generations are not repeatable or editable by the system) that actively work against it solving all the problems these industries are inventing for it to solve on top of it being the core of the latest cycle of cynical buzzword hopping that never lasts because the entire point is being the new hotness.

This on top of it requiring the building of massively expensive data centers and power plants that are not only expensive but a long term commitment in the face of a corporate culture that has no vision beyond vague five years plans, its creations a the product of a non-human and thus currently generate IP that cannot be copyrighted and exploited for profit.

For example, an AI won't be able to write a coherent sequel to a popular dungeon because it doesn't actually understand what made that dungeon popular and even if it managed to write one, it wouldn't graps the concept of building off the previous one. You'd get dead NPCs just back and in new roles and now the One Ring is Samwise's primary weapon.

 

[Argyle King]

When "every industry" is doing something, that's suspicious. What do industries as diverse as healthcare and toy making have in common?

Well, one big thing: wealthy investors.

That doesn't mean generative AI can't also be useful in certain contexts. It does mean that the cart is before the horse. The fixation - especially from groups like Goldman "We'll take your taxpayers' money and pay our execs millions of dollars in a year where we helped precipitate a worldwide financial crisis" Sachs - is on finding uses and excuses for using AI (and legends and myths and misunderstandings about AI), rather than on finding organic ways in which generative AI can be useful. Goldman isn't interested in AI or D&D, it's interested in money.

To Cook's credit, it sounds like he's got a better orientation than most CEO's. He's aware of some of the threats, and he's more cautious than many I've seen. But he's also at a Goldman Sachs event, telling wealthy investors what they want to hear, regardless of how much of an empty fart it is, regardless of the problems that their little pet money-making scheme might cause.

That sounds dire.

How painful do you expect things to get if Sachs follow Cocks into D&D?

With as much as was spent to purchase DDB, I imagine that Hasbro hopes to get a return on investment.

Does Goldman Sachs having a working relationship with WotC or Hasbro?

 

[I'm A Banana]

That sounds dire.

Less dire than some cases, for sure!

How painful do you expect things to get if Sachs follow Cocks into D&D?

D&D is owned by Hasbro, whose top investors are huge investment firms. The investors are already there, and have been for a while.

Since D&D is one of the profit centers, I'd generally expect D&D to be pushed more toward monetization in general in the coming years. I don't know specifically what might be planned, but I could imagine scenarios like paying an D&D AI image generator to make your character portrait, or paying an D&D AI to give you an adventure. (Pay a $5 token per use, or subscribe for $30/month and get TEN free tokens!) Probably not in 2025, but maybe by 2027-2028 (assuming this thing has legs for 3 more years, which it could!). These are only guesses - things that "might not be too bad" or "might actually be kind of useful."

This isn't exactly an awful fate, and there might even be some demand out there for stuff like this. But, of course, this makes it harder to sell your services as a D&D character portrait artist or a D&D adventure writer...AI don't need to pay rent and medical bills. And if it's "good enough for my home game..."

With as much as was spent to purchase DDB, I imagine that Hasbro hopes to get a return on investment.

I don't think this is specific to DDB. I imagine that return on investment was considered a long time ago. I think this is specific to a certain venn diagram overlap between tech bros and finance bros (two groups that love to talk about AI) at a Goldman Sachs technology conference, and Cocks speaking to that audience.

Does Goldman Sachs having a working relationship with WotC or Hasbro?

Not that I know of at the moment, but I'm just some dude on the internet. Goldman Sachs isn't itself a big investment firm, it's more like a corporate financial advice firm. They help other companies manage their investments. They probably throw conferences like this every once in a while to build relations with other big companies that might someday want their services. This one in particular was kind of targeted at tech firms, which makes Hasbro a slightly weird fit, but only slightly.

Like, if Cocks had attended on Hasbro's behalf two years ago, he'd probably have been asked about how crypto and the blockchain would bend the cost curve, and given a similarly kind of milquetoast answer, because that was the tech and investor trend at the time. And in two years, it'll probably be some other novelty.

The main risk of these things is when someone influential in the company (like the CEO) drinks the hype train kool-aid, like when established companies started flirting with selling NFT's a few years ago. It's a little hard to tell how serious Cocks is about the commitment to AI here - it sounds to me a little like he feels it's inevitable and also that he's aware of some good boundaries he'll need with it. The former thing feels like a problem to me, the latter thing seems pretty healthy.

There's also a sign in here that Cocks thinks that tech and communications corps like AT&T, microchip manufacturers, NVIDIA, Amazon, etc., are engaged in some of the same work that Hasbro is engaged in, which isn't the most obvious fit, but also isn't entirely out of left field (toys use a lot of tech these days!).

 

[cbwjm]

I'm all for AI being used in DnD, my like Cocks, myself and many of my friends have made use of chatgpt or some sort of AI art program for our games. My current DM has a bunch of AI generated images to show us for the town we're exploring just to give us an image that we can use as a reference.

I've used chatgpt for campaign development just to see where I can go with it and it was actually pretty good at getting the skeleton of a campaign built. I asked some questions regarding random encounters, it created them and gave me new creatures that I could further develop, at the time I had to adjust things a little to bring it up in power or to properly add a proficiency bonus, but otherwise it wasn't too bad and could have been used straight away had I wanted to. It's great for furthering ideas.

 

[aco175]

And if that leads in 10 years to buying a digital adventure path and it has the basics and automatically customizes it to who the characters are and what your party is doing, based on what half a million other DMs are doing with it plus a rich catelog of public domain books, I can see that coming.

It would be cool if I can take a module from one company and tell the robots to convert it to fit in my Forgotten Realms Phandalin region.