The CEO of Hasbro (the company that owns Wizards of the Coast, which in itself makes D&D and Magic: The Gathering) has been effusive and cheery about AI in the past, saying that the fact all his mates are using it in his home games is a signal “we need to be embracing it” back in 2024.
It is now 2026, and Chris Cocks—speaking to The Verge’s Nilay Patel—still uses a ton of it in his own personal games, but has slightly changed his tune as to how welcome it might be in D&D writ large.
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I’m not going to get too high on my horse about what Mr Cocks does in his free time—while every single TTRPG group I’m in is deeply averse to using the tech, it’s not like I haven’t plucked a PNG from an artist’s profile (with credit, mind) for use in my personal game from time to time.
But as I mentioned back in 2024 (“AI can’t replicate the deep joy in seeing a twist you devised to shock your players land, or in seeing your table grow attached to your NPCs”) the whole joy of D&D for me is playing a story that my mate wrote—if they didn’t bother writing it? I’m not really bothered about playing it.
Also, more cynically—I would wonder whether a CEO salary for one of the biggest toymakers in the world could very easily pay for commissioned artwork. I suspect it would be a drop in the bucket for Cocks, if slower.
Speaking anecdotally, every actual creative person who knows how to make the kind of art AI mercilessly rips from has responded to the tech with revulsion—and even those neutral on it have soured over time.
But hey, Cocks is a CEO and I guess it’s his job to be speculative for shareholders or what-have-you: “You can’t ignore it, you can’t stick your head in the sand … And is it going to be disruptive? Yeah. Have people figured out the business model yet? No.
Anyway—I’m glad to see that, similar to how the internet bullied people out of NFTs in mainstream games, the D&D and Magic: The Gathering fan bases are so thoroughly against AI-generated slop that even Cocks, who uses heaps of it in his own D&D games, doesn’t think it’s worth placing in a book. Small victories.
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