Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks has revealed that he personally uses a massive amount of AI tools in his own Dungeons & Dragons campaigns – from animations to voice cloning – yet acknowledges that Magic: The Gathering and D&D fans don’t want AI-generated content in their favorite games. As a result, the company is keeping these franchises entirely out of AI-based development pipelines.

Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks laid out his dual relationship with generative AI in a podcast conversation with The Verge‘s Nilay Patel. By his own account, he personally runs three to four Dungeons & Dragons campaigns simultaneously, and makes heavy use of AI-based tools for all of them – including animations, images, text, sound effects, and voice cloning.

“I DM probably three or four groups. There is so much AI-based animation, images, text, sound effects, and voice cloning on my PC, it would floor you,” Cocks said. He nonetheless acknowledged that D&D and Magic: The Gathering audiences don’t want these tools applied to the products they buy. “There are some brands that the audience, the creators, just don’t want it, so we don’t even have it in our pipelines for our video games or for Magic: The Gathering, or D&D,” he added.

In other areas of Hasbro‘s business, however, the technology is being actively used: in toy design, for instance, AI models trained on the company’s own intellectual property are used to quickly generate concept renderings and product ideas. Cocks says this allows them to produce “pretty sophisticated renderings pretty fast of products and ideas.”

The CEO spoke optimistically about AI’s broader future, invoking a Napster analogy: just as the music industry survived its disruption and eventually became more profitable than ever, he believes a workable business model will eventually emerge for AI as well. When Patel pointed out that the music industry’s renewed profitability has largely benefited a handful of major players rather than most creators, Cocks argued that the technology is already out of the bottle – and that those who refuse to adapt will likely end up worse off.

The PC Gamer article notes that fan resistance – similar to how NFTs were pushed out of mainstream games – has at least ensured that D&D and Magic: The Gathering products remain free of generative AI content for now.

Source: PC Gamer