Hasbro CEO says all his mates are using AI for their D&D games, which is apparently 'a clear signal that we need to be embracing it'

Wizards of the Coast—that is, the folks who make Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering—have had a very public, very bumpy relationship over the use of AI in marketing materials and sourcebooks lately. Every time it happens, the resulting outrage kicks up enough dust to cause thorough backpedalling and apologies.

That hasn't stopped Hasbro (WoTC's parent company) CEO Chris Cocks from getting very excited about using AI in D&D, though. Speaking at a Goldman Sachs conference (via Futurism), Cocks casually mentions that «inside of development, we've already been using AI,» before clarifying that it's mostly machine-learning or proprietary stuff: «We will deploy it significantly and liberally internally as both a knowledge worker aid and as a development aid.»

However, in a bizarre line of thought, Cocks—who apparently plays D&D with «30 or 40 people regularly» (I barely have time for two TTRPG games, Chris, are you just in a bunch of West Marches campaigns?) notes that «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.»

Look—I'm not going to sit here on a throne of ethical superiority. While I've never purposefully touched generative AI to run any of my TTRPG groups, I have, absolutely, taken to Pinterest to grab one or two reference images for my games in the past. Homebrew campaigns devised entirely from the sweat of the DM's brow are few and far between. I'll concede that generative AI isn't too many steps far removed from that, and if it's just four random people I'll never meet mucking around on a Discord server, whatever. I don't approve, but it's your life.

But campaign development? Character development? That's like, 90% of my job as a DM, and part of the reason I enjoy running games in the first place. Cocks continues: «The themes around using AI to enable user-generated content, using AI to streamline new player