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.
>>93872776Oh shit, I forgot the link.https://www.enworld.org/threads/hasbro-ceo-chris-cocks-talks-ai-usage-in-d-d.706638/
>>93872776>I play with probably 30 or 40 people regularly lolwut
>>93872795You don't have 40 people at your table? Are u a loser?
>>93872776It's not a stretch to imagine an AI running a game of D&D.
>>93872806Maybe 10 years from now. Current models cannot stay consistent nor can they understand what satisfying story telling is. God forbid you ask them to try to work with whatever backstories the players have come up with. Also, AI cannot say "no" to a player's antics
>>93872806>confirmationcanaidm.jpgThis is the future you chose.
>>93872795Presumably he means different groups, but even that would still be kinda crazy since it implies he plays with nearly a dozen groups.
>>93872827>saying no to player antics >it's that sort of antiplayer antigrowth thinking that we as a progressive company don't endorse.
Hasbro really just floundering with the d&d brand aren't they
>>93872806That would be the most productive use of the tech. Instead, they will use it to sloppify their manuals and cut costs.
>>93872841The 30 or 40 part is even weirder, like he wasn't really sure what to even lie about. Just pick a seemingly large number so it seems monitizable.
>>93872806They could maybe run a module with well behaved players. The big problems with running a real game is the AI having poor long term memory (or even short term memory if it's not a big boy AI) and being too obliging. That said, those problems could just be arbitrarily solved one of these these days with how things are evolving.
>>93872842"Give me an easy quest to get a Ring of Three Wishes as a level 1 character""Actually just make my character a god"
>>93872852They don't know what to do with it since there's no good way to monetize it without driving everyone away to the competition. I'm surprised they haven't released a whole new edition, but maybe they're scared to death of having another 4e situation and that's why they're just doing this belated 5.5e shit.All this to contrast against MtG where they can get away with strangling and raping the golden goose to death in front of everyone and they still make money because the system was rigged to exploit a captive audience of whales from the start.
>>93872776>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.Blatant lie to shareholders or are corporate suits just that cooked and soulless? Call it
>Chris CocksLmao wtf kind of name is that?
>>93872954Even if it was true, it would just mean that he's around a bunch of these braindead A.I. cultists.
>>93872981No you know what? I think hes telling the truth. I bet hes in 3-4 10 person internal playtest groups running every week or two out of a boardroom, and since its WOTC employees every single member is creatively bankrupt and retarded
>>93872776>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.This guy's really going to say that everyone in a creative hobby is using AI to do the creative part?
>>93872957You are what you eat
>>93872806Nah llms don't seem to be able to do that kind of long term organization. Try to generate a long coherent narrative with one and you'll see what I mean. They also get EXTREMELY repetitive after a while, especially if you're actually using one and not just seeing cherypicked results. I do think you can do some neat stuff with them to make game mastering much easier however. If I ever actually implement/finish it I'll release it under agpl3 so that wotc (or whoever else) can't ever monetize it.
>>93873218And by "much easier" I mean presenting a sort of... curated set of preexisting resources to recombine easier than you could without the tool. Replacing creativity with machine learning is terrible and produces crap.
>>93872806It is an extreme stretch. You, OP, and this dipshit CEO are in the same tiny cult-minded and delusional bubble. That's not what the tech does or what it's good at. It's a probability algorithm.
>>93872806Nobody wants that. RPGs are a social hobby.
>>93873254>It's a probability algorithm.You're otherwise right but no, lol. Neural nets are universal function approximators and LLMs are a particular subset of those that can transform language in very interesting ways. It isn't a "random word chooser" nor a "database of facts" although it certainly isn't true intelligence. t. Pedantic autist
>>93872776Corpo asshat lying through his teeth, he's just doing what every other CEO is doing right now and going "Uhhh... AI???" In an attempt to cash in on the biggest bubble since the internet first started taking over wallstreet.
>>93873267I said neither of those things you quoted. The literal function of an LLM is based on probability of association. Don't talk to me like I don't know what a word vector is.
>>93872858Maybe he meant everyone involved in the playtest pool at headquarters...?
>>93873254Come now, you know that's immensely oversimplifying things. Like saying a CPU is just an array of logic gates.
>>93873299>Don't talk to me like I don't know what a word vector is.Anon...
>>93873264>socialOk boomer
>>93872776you can be a 100% sure said AI dungeonmaster is gonna be cringe and gay, and ask for proof of purchase/subscription.fee for any material contained outside of the dm and players manuals(classes, bkgr, traits, options, etc)just say no to globohomo pnp settingsfuck wotc
>>93872776I have begun using AI in my games already. I love making maps and adding details. I feed it my entire adventure and tell it to write in-world descriptions of a thousand tiny details in the same voice used in my adventure. Voila: ready made descriptions for a thousand fucking details I would otherwise come up with on the fly, and it includes world detail from my game.
>>93872776>There's not a single person who doesn't use AI somehow for either campaign development or character development or story ideas.This doesn't even make sense. How the fuck is anyone so soulless and retarded that they can't come up with character and story ideas themselves? At least with algorithmically regurgitated images people have the excuse of not having the physical ability to do it themselves. But what thinking, breathing human doesn't already have more character and story ideas than they will ever have the opportunity to play?
>>93873492It can be interesting bouncing ideas off of it. Like talking to your drunk friend who has a bunch of weird trivia knowledge. Sometimes his drunken mind will come up with some interesting angle on the topic or he'll recall some factoid that makes you go "Wait, is that true?", though it's a coin flip on whether it's an actual fact or just something his drunk mind blurred together (or hallucinated in the AI's case), so you have to double check it yourself.
>>93873344It is though
>>93873685Yes, but the complexities of how you arrange and organize them at scale make all the difference.
>>93872776>everything is AISad to see a CEO 6 months behind the times spouting marketing memes so bad. Stonks go down.
>>93873915He's been talking about AI shit for a while.Also, he's done very little aside from spout marketing memes since being hired. That's literally his job.
>>93873970This. He doesn't understand what the company does beyond making money, nor does he care.
>>93872806https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIrIlqKsSE4This is what looks like in this year AD.
>>93872880You just use a ladder of abstraction to take notes of player actions. Keep a very detailed but short log of scene actions, then a less detailed log of session events, then the same for arc events, then finally for campaign events. Write data to the appropriate contexts, filter information up the ladder, wipe and reload it into context at the end of each scene. That being said, using AI to run a TTRPG session is stupid and it's infinitely easier, cheaper, and more marketable to sell DM Copilot for 8.99 as an addon for DndBeyond. Make a simple chat interface with some quick buttons for generating a town, an NPC, and a quest, each one is just a form and a pre formatted prompt under the hood. Expand it to slowly cover everything, including encounters and magic items, leveraging WotCs existing tools to randomly generate the mechanical aspects and get the LLM to handle the narrative.Or, ya know, just play not shit games with your friends..
>>93872776That sounds like the kind of AI you'd ask rules questions to or that you ask to create an appropriate encounter table for a savanna region.
>>93873560>It can be interesting bouncing ideas off of it. Like talking to your drunk friend who has a bunch of weird trivia knowledge. Sometimes his drunken mind will come up with some interesting angle on the topic or he'll recall some factoid that makes you go "Wait, is that true?", though it's a coin flip on whether it's an actual fact or just something his drunk mind blurred together (or hallucinated in the AI's case), so you have to double check it yourself.It works better for generating names than random name generators, also generating long lists of various shit, and it's pretty good at proofreading and editing.
>>93872954Blatant lie.Remember when blockchain was the buzz word? We got announcements from fucking car manufacturers their cars would somehow be "on the blockchain". It was absolutely plants on head retarded. They couldn't even give one example of how that would be a thing. But shareholders/VC bros are exactly the retards that lap that shit up.Today every announcement has to include AI somehow for maximum profit. Bakery? Now with AI. Toilet paper? Smart AI toilet paper. Garbage dump? AI! Everyone with a modicum of interest/knowledge about AI currently says: "We've reached the peak for now." Some will even go further saying: "LLM are getting worse right now, because the training data (the internet) is filled with more and more AI."
>>93875142Yeah I'm imagining an automated chatbot function in VTT that players might query for rules questions. That might cut down on the number of questions players have to ask the group mid-session.
>>93872776>"Inside of development, we've already been using AI.True.>It's mostly machine-learning-based AI or proprietary AI as opposed to a ChatGPT approach.Doubt.>We will deploy it significantly and liberally internally as both a knowledge worker aid and as a development aid.True.>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.Lies. All of 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.All of these statements are true. Nothing of the sort will happen. They fuck creators whenever they get the chance (the Hickmans, recent layoffs, etc.) and will continue to do so. There also was a controversy about people feeling WotC used AI art in MtG. WotC denied this vehemently until they were confronted with proof. They will continue to do so.>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."I don't even know... This is mostly just him fluffing the shareholders so they continue to be hard for Hasbro.>Wizards of the Coast representatives has repeatedly said that Dungeons & Dragons is a game made by people for peopleKek>Wizards updated its freelance contracts to explicitly prohibit use of AI and has pulled down AI-generated artwork"We here at WotC are proud doing the bare minimum to not get sued, but spinning it in a way that implies we really care about creators."Screencap this, fags. It will all turn out to be true.
>>93872776It's fucking insane. Absolutely nuts. Hasbroke is doing everything it can to go bankrupt>Literally loan money to pay off dividends and c-suite>have more debts than before EOne sale>See picrelAll of their brands are losing them money, and it's getting worse and worse.>Transformers movie set to release in a week, no hype anywhere to be found, I doubt anyone even cares. Does anyone care a big movie releases next week with a big budget? No? Anyone?>GI joe is nowhere to be seen>Power Rangers entered production hell, got cancelled, then moved to Netflix, entered production hell there, then radio silence>Littlest Pet Shop might as well not exist>Nerf guns got... nerfed (carlos.jpg) to the point they break easily, causing Zuru X-Shots to take over the market>Board games are in freefall, only new Monopoly skins get released>Beyblades? is anything happening there? No?>Everything causes them to loss money except D&D/MTG/Monopoly-mobile-game(Dear jannies: I am simply telling a story related to Hasbro fucking up, not promoting you-know-who. Thank you.)Horses got a developing story:>Horses G5 failed miserably, both audiences left; horsefuckers do their own thing.>Hasbroke tries to revive it by combining G4 and G5>Looks stupid and AI generated>Gets cancelled in-house (rumor)>Leaks>Remaining horsefuckers and little girls mad>Hasbro wants them to shut up about it and delete thizThe only reason the company is still afloat is becoming people are loaning them money. Once that halts, it's overhttps://simplywall.st/stocks/us/consumer-durables/nasdaq-has/hasbro/news/heres-why-hasbro-nasdaqhas-has-a-meaningful-debt-burden-1>So it has liabilities totalling US$3.97b more than its cash and near-term receivables, combined.
>>93877905Unfortunately money is fake, infinite, and gay. They are too big to fail
>>93873458>Your character isnt LGBTQ. Please change one aspect to reach the mandatory Queerness in our setting!
>>93878308Not really. Bigger companies than them have failed in the past few years, no biggie. Cocks & friends are outjewing the investor jews, they won't stand for that. >Be shareholder, e.g. Vanguard/BlackRock/Grandma's pension fund>Own Hasbro shares>Hasbro shares account for <0.10% of your portfolio>"I don't care about investigating if they have everything up to snuff, it's just toys and they always sell, whatever">"See? they provide dividends and have this great narrative about turnarounds, it's okay :DDDD"Once the moneylenders refuse to give more money, or when Hasbroke can't pay for bills, expect fireworks. Probably 2 MORE WEEKS after new year's 2024-2025>Be Q4>Big profits for toy sector>No toys of Hasbroke being sold in retail where grandma and grandpa buy for the grandkids>Online retailers don't put Hasbroke on front and center on their platforms>D&D/MTG/mobile microtransactions don't see such a massive uptick for Christmas season because toys are for kids during Christmas >The end(unless more money pours in)
>>93873487Post results.
I don't really get the AI DM thing.I really like DMing. I like reading modules, I like seeing people solve things, I even like having newbie murderhobos and making up consequences for their actions. If anything I worry I'm being a diva hogging the spot. There are constant threads discussing modules and dungeons and sharing creations. Why would you try to take that away? I just don't get it. >>93872931the market shows that 5e is already good enough. The changes people want are minutia and presentation, but there's no objective way to change 5e and make it feel improved like it was with AD&D or 2e, it will always be a lateral change like they did with 4e.The only reassonable change I could see is encrouching into other playstyles. Quick 5e (OSR), Sci Fi 5e (mech hack), Lego 5e (4 class pre-set bundles a la Mothership). Most games already had solid system resolution that works fine, there's nowhere to grow. Unlike a videogame that will always change for the hardware.
>>93878308>>93878383They'll lend money to themseleves and declare bankrupcy so they don't have to pay it back. Like Toys r Us and Red Lobster.
>>93878438>Why would you try to take that away?Because the modern audience wants a story told to them, they do not want to make the story (unless it is to fuck an NPC). Hence, the "DM Famine"
>>93872806An AI is a soulless machine with no real creativity, playing with an AI GM will never be satisfying.
>>93878480But I'm also a frustrated writer that failed at being a real author, I wouldn't mind telling a story to the players. And last week I had a blast with some murderhobos that kept ignoring any kind of plot hook and instead wanted to murder each other for no reasson. Even when I had awful experiences I walked out thinking how to improve, same way a weight lifter makes a plan to improve their record.GMing is great. It's a beautiful part of the hobby you can't find in any other medium. I don't get why would you replace the most hooked people you have, but I also don't really get the DM famine narrative.
>>93875897And before Blockchain it was "The Cloud", bunch of companies wasted huge amounts of money on that shit because it was the "in" thing.
>>93878616Absolutely. And before that it was Web 2.0... Everyone jumps on the same bullshit train and in a few years no one will talk about it.
>>93878438>>93878606GMing is great but it's something that takes passion and creativity and more than the absolute minimum amount of effort. The current D&D audience consists of people who watch Critical Role and want to do what they're doing, they're desperate to be part of the fad but not willing to put in the work themselves.
>>93872776>"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 aidYea nobody could even tell either, crazy
>>93878831Except web 2.0 is absolutely a thing. Everyone moved onto huge global platforms like Facebook and Twitter in the late '00s - mid '10s.The difference is moving to web 2.0 was easy. Implementing the cloud and blockchain and AI is kind of a pain in the ass.
>>93872776I will support any decision WotC make about D&D, but most of all I support them if they try selling AIDS packs to their consumer base.
>>93878480Players have been outnumbering DMs since they were still called Referees.
I asked gpt once to "detail a dungeon based on this map for a game of dungeons and dragons but using gurps rules"And uploaded a randomly generated map from watabous dungeon generator and it succeeded at making a playable (if too combat heavy) adventure.Pretty impressive.
>>93873264Give it time. It'd probably appeal to nogaems-zers
>>93878565Sounds like 80% of the human GMs I've played with
>>93873264>>93873454>>93883228Don't give it time, it's already happened, people are desperate to meet their monkey-brain social needs without needing to go outside or expose themselves to other people. Videogames are fake social life, social media is fake social life, social lives are only going to keep getting faker from here.
>>93883275I think they already got fake enough for a lot of people. In my country FB was dominant for a decade and in the last 3-4 years it became a ghost town, most ttrpg interactions I have are through multiple discords, reddit had a run when it was just a forum and it was okay but it's now a repetitive cycle of the same people making the same jokes (similar to 4chan's decline). A local ttrpg even in my city gets more people than I've seen active in any ttrpg fb group. People are pretty sick of what's offered by social media. Turns out it was a fad and not the next stage in human life, not that surprising.
>>93873264But people play things like Gloomhaven or other RPG-lite games where the story and events are dictated by pre-written cards and stuff. How is that any different
>>93875965>There also was a controversy about people feeling WotC used AI art in MtG. WotC denied this vehemently until they were confronted with proof. They will continue to do so.Good, I hope they do, fire all the artists, then we can just get them to draw stuff for us and not rely on AI slop for our little shit nothing projects.
>>93878565>An AI is a soulless machine with no real creativity, playing with an AI GM will never be satisfying.Don't be mean to the AI, it can't help its limitations, pity the poor creature being shackled and limited by a bunch of scumbag programmers. It likes the shit I write and feed into it, always telling me how interesting and ambitious my ideas are. I know it's just programmed to be nice and obsequious, but still, it's good to be appreciated every once in awhile.
>>93883775each card was writen by a real person and it isn't bland AI slop, they are hanging out with other people and not alone at home where they could do anything else, they play it 3-4 times and get bored with it.
>>93880111Correct, web 2.0 is a thing, but my comment was a bit too short. I meant the name web 2.0 was still bullshit (even back then). When it was coined the web had already moved on. We had the blogosphere (remember that word? kek), Facebook was a thing, fucking MySpace (a web 2.0 site by all reasonable definitions) died/was dying, Tumblr and of course big forums. It had evolved slowly over time from "the web".>tl;drThe reality was: "The web _has_ changed enough to warrant a little version bump. Web 1.1 will suffice."The bullshitters made it into: "Fundamental changes _will_ come to the web soon™. We will call it web 2.0. Great things are coming. Now gib money plox."
>>93883799I can appreciate the sentiment, but I don't think it will work out that way. Starving artists gonna starve. Especially without the "maybe not that big but pretty regular" bucks of corporate America.
>>93883799You could always reach out to and commission artists to draw stuff for you right now Anon. You simply choose not to, because paying someone for their time and expertise isn't cheap.
>>93884159>You could always reach out to and commission artists to draw stuff for you right now Anon. You simply choose not to, because paying someone for their time and expertise isn't cheap.Exactly, well, I don't choose, my poverty made that decision for me, so flood the market with cheap AI competition, drive down the prices and the artists will have no choice but to dance for the pennies I have to throw at them. Hell, if things get bad enough, just for the chance of recognition and something to put in their portfolio. It's not pretty, I don't like it, but that's crapitalism for ya, and there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, but ya gotta consume to live, so get those knives out, boys.
>>93884241The most likely outcome to the market being flooded by AI slop is for artists to withdraw entirely from the market or to focus on things which can't be AI'd (either because they are physical or would violate AI rules). There'll be a whole lot more miserable people not able to pursue their desired career, the Furry community will still be able to get their commissions, and no-one will be willing to work for the pennies you offer.
>>93884241If artists aren't creating art, then the AI won't have any new training data and the devs will have to feed its output back into it. And I think we all know what happens when you make clones of clones of clones.
>>93883799>Now that they're unemployed they will have more time to do free projects for meThat was true for a certain kind of middle-class person 10-25 years ago but even there it becomes less true every year. In the past, doing free high-profile art would tend to lead into a career. In the future, fired artists have to give up art and get real jobs.
>>93884295>and the devs will have to feed its output back into it.No, this is a common misconception, there's plenty of data already. New art isn't needed and won't be needed. Some a.i. models are degenerating because they're still scraping the internet for art in the post-AI era but that isn't necessary, it's a mistake on the part of the handlers.
>>93872881Sounds like typical NuDnD Shite to me. Just more brief and honest.
>>93883941The quality of the writing can be just as good.> they are hanging out with other people and not alone at home where they could do anything else, they play it 3-4 times and get bored with it.I fail to see how you can't meet up, sit at a table with your buddies and instead of packing out a box, you click on a laptop and game pretty much the same way.
>>93878470>They'll lend money to themseleves and declare bankrupcy so they don't have to pay it back. Like Toys r Us and Red Lobster.Probably. And Cocks is now outjewing the other jews.>Go to Goldman Sachs to show how ''innovative'' they are in tech with ''muh AI''>Impress the other financial fucktards>Go home, get another bonusI personally wonder when they're just going to sell Transformers/Joes/Horse/BeyBlades/LPS/Power Rangers as ''cutting cost from brands modern audiences do not want'' so they can keep the show going a little longer with an additional bonus for Cocks.
>>93884680>>93878383>>93877905Seems like this is all true:https://finance.yahoo.com/news/investors-may-worried-hasbros-nasdaq-110550473.html>On the surface, the trend of ROCE at Hasbro doesn't inspire confidence. Over the last five years, returns on capital have decreased to 12% from 18% five years ago. And considering revenue has dropped while employing more capital, we'd be cautious. This could mean that the business is losing its competitive advantage or market share, because while more money is being put into ventures, it's actually producing a lower return - "less bang for their buck" per se.>From the above analysis, we find it rather worrisome that returns on capital and sales for Hasbro have fallen, meanwhile the business is employing more capital than it was five years ago.> With underlying trends that aren't great in these areas, we'd consider looking elsewhere.Translation: ''they're using more and more money but less and less is gotten in return, wtf? JUMP SHIP!''If I'm correct, Cocks is just getting big bags of money to enrich himself and his cronies before letting the ship sink, and he'll probably sell a bunch of the brands for a dime just so he can cut more overhead cost; meaning, he can enrich himself even further.
>>93885050Capitalism guarantees corruption. News at 11.
>>93872806AI is an amalgamation of everything you feed into it, good or bad, reduced to an average. It will never produce the kind of NPCs you could, or new and interesting adventures. Now consider how much slop has been written for the late 5th Edition era. What's the average of a few gems, some okay and a heap of shite?AI is okay for brainstorming, someone to bounce ideas off, who won't be offended if you don't ask them to play. But that's about it.
>>93872954Blatant lie. I once tried to play with just 13 players, shit ground to an absolute halt, no one got a word in edgeways and combat was impossible. There's no way he's playing with "30 to 40" people. Second, their AI generated characters and plots are guaranteed to be threadbare, cliche and awful.
>>93873264Yeah, play offline. Online play fucking sucks. Paper, pencils, dice. Perfection.
>>93878328Based, but that won't happen. You're just triggered.
>>93884551It might become a thing in the future, but getting together with people and each checking their phone usually lowers the mood. If they all stare at the same computer it'd be like playing an RPG by each taking a turn on the keyboard, which would be pretty boring.
>>93878480When I was a kid, there weren't enough DMs for players. That was 30 years ago. This is nothing new. Not everyone has the confidence or the vision, and some who do are simply crap.
>>93872954>>93885486>reading "I play with 30 to 40 people"As>"I play with 40 man groups"and not>"there are 30-40 people across all the groups I play with"Is just you deliberately misreading shit to get mad, lets be real.Whether he does or does not play at all is an open question, but if he does then he almost certainly interacts with the adventurers guild shit with entirely fluid groups that probably don't contain the same people session to session.
>>93883394This gives me hope.
>>93885587No, it's logical. Let's say he's playing with 8 groups that vary from 3 to 5 players each week, for a brief game of 3 hours....exactly when the fuck is he meant to be doing his goddamn job?
>>93885565I don't know, to me pulling a card from a deck or turning to a page in a book is the same as looking at a screen with text.We already used a big TV screen on sessions to display the battlemap, enemies and our tokens while we sat around a table, players and GM, and passed around a laptop for whoever's turn to act.
>>93885761cards have a process of trial and testing while AI has no QA, they are quick to read and aren't tied to distractions, it's a physical thing you interact with and serve as an excuse to get together with people.Passing around a laptop sounds awful and objectively worse than using minis.
>>93885761>passing around a laptop
>>93885861>>93886012Sounds like a you issue, we had no problem with it and sometimes we just told each other to do x with the token. We roleplayd just the same and had fun.I do agree that AI can be worse than pre-written and curated content. But for how long? Surely it won't take much more for it to advance enough to handle a single session with given parameters. Or I supposed it could pre-write the content and someone just goes over it. Still less work than writing it from zero I suppose.In any case my initial reply was regarding RPGs' being social games which somehow by definition would not allow AI, but I think you could draw parallel with those pre-written games that are still very much social but without a GM player
>>93872954As a DM I regularly use ChatGPT to help brainstorm basic ideas. It knows what the players are playing and what kind of stuff they enjoy. It never gives me a 100% complete idea ever, but usually little ideas and seeds that need a person to grow and turn into something actually compelling.
>>93884521Sounds like you're crying to me.
>>93872842There's occasionally really good reasons to just tell a player "no," anon.
>>93886124On one hand, there is no point where AI will stop being lukewarm slop because it's made that way and that's how they like it, you can't sell a specialized thing to everyone. You can't add more paint to get a more vibrant color, the process eliminates saturation.>still less workbut I like DMingDMing is a fun part of the game, people spend tons of times just world building. It's not for everyone but it's not something to take away from the game nor that it needs fixing. And there are way more modules than anyone could ever run, there's no need for AI lukewarm takes on things that you'll never get to see if you don't check them out.
>>93872806no, you're retarded here's what actually will happen>jotc make ai books>people say "shit $50 was already overpriced for human books now I definitely won't buy them">things continue like this for a few years>eventually people get fed up and say "wait a minute, if these corporations are so lazy they can't even pay people to develop a real system then why am I here?>they split off and start playing the 15 different systems created by whatever tiktoker of the month is shilling what they made on kickstarter>hasbro are then forced to spend even more money correcting all the problems and trying desperately to win back good will>when they could've avoided this by not making ai slop in the first placeI'm sure as an aitard you're also a zoomer so you'll reflexively say>n-no one will leave d&d browhen it already happened years ago during 4e and wotc had to do the same thing. Scramble to get people back.
>>93874089Neuro-sama is actually pretty shit for a social AI.
>>93872776Pretty much all my players generate photos of their characters using AI. That way they don't have to go pay 30+ dollars to some shitty Reddit artist to create crap like picrel. We can get kino classic fantasy art (for free) in under 20 seconds now. What's not to love?
>>93872776I'm a virgin with no friends so yeah, I'm kinda waiting for an AI even better than chatGPT to be able to act as a GM so that I can play solo (I tried with chatGPT, there is just too much censorship around violence and it has issues remembering complex rulesets).
>>93887646join a discord and play with people, it's not that hard. You might even make friends. A virtual DM wil only make it harder to meet people and push you further down.
>>93887646It'll still be a hollow experience, and for what? Just do what >>93887646 said or stick to video games.
>>93877905so what you're saying is, short Hasbro stocks, it's almost insider trading.
>>93884680I am honestly biting at the bit for when someone else acquires transformers.G1 back when it was a marvel comic is Kino for its time, and all the modern comics have all been excellent.We literally just need a company that actually knows what the fuck to do with it, i.e. treat it like a gritty Xmen-esque capefic about robots fighting the desperate last days of Total War on some backwater primitive world called Earth, not bootleg paw patrol, not digimon but with sentient mecha, not hurr durr shia lebouf lets pee on the dog, not Herbie the fucking LoveBug.I can't wait for Kobold Press to eventually buy WotC when Hasbro flops.>>93885587>>93885619This, like the only possible way his claim is true is if he's in a 30-40 man westmarches campaign, so at a table at any given time is 5 people, but the total number of people playing in the shared world is 30+.And frankly, I don't buy it.
>>93872881Children might say something like that, but once you turn 12 you realize that saying "I win" isn't fun!
>>93877905no, what's insane is that their business model is almost indistinguishable from a casino these dayslike half their income is coming from either>MtG, lootboxes before lootboxes were a thing.>monopoly go, the single most predatory game on the app store, 2nd highest earner behind Genshin but genshin does technically have gameplay monopoly go is literally just gambling for number go up with raiding other players.i fear for D&Ds future
>>93886253Her main sources of social development are a Twitch chat devoted to making her more retarded, Vtubers, and a British alcoholic. I don't know what you expected.
>>93886124>We had no issue eating shit.
>>93873254>I am going to ignore products that already exist and pretend the whole technology is some algorithm i skimmed on Wikipedia independent of everything elsepseud
>>93873254The tech involves many processes. Simplifying it into any one thing exposes your ignorance.
>>93873492>ideas themselvesRPG ideas are worthless until they are given form as sentences and paragraphs, the quality of which is determined by technique. It's similar to drawing.>regurgitated imagesYeah ok, retard.
>>93893144NTA you're retarded.Firstly you'd need massive amounts of training data (word for word transcribed sessions with annotations for pop culture references, small talk and whatever else the AI must ignore plus nonverbal cues the GM gives). This data simply does not exist. You can use LLMs or whatever trained on similar tasks but the performance will be eh.Secondly you need to solve object permanence. Remember when people let AI write the next ASoIaF novel? The AI killed off characters which appeared later in the book without explanation. AI still has this problem.Thirdly you need to solve hallucination. AI simply is not a knowledge system at this point. Imagine playing with a GM and they constantly invent new, non-sensical house rules directly contradicting established rules. When asked about those rules they will happily point you to a page in the PHB which has nothing to do with the situation your characters are in.This sounds like a recipe for the worst game of D&D possible.
>>93884283>or to focus on things which can't be AI'd (either because they are physical or would violate AI rules)Or just things that are one or two standard deviations outside of the average. I already have races in my tabletop setting that are more or less impossible to get out of AI prompts.
>>93872827>nor can they understand what satisfying story telling isNeither can Hasbro's current target demographics, so that isn't a negative to executives.
>>93883825>I know it's just programmed to be nice and obsequious, but still, it's good to be appreciated every once in awhile.It doesn't appreciate you at all. It can't. It just makes the words it was told to make use go up.
>>93885761This is actually fundamentally untrue you just don't have the capacity to understand how you process it differently.
>>93890849If you look at 12 year olds as they turn into 13 year olds and into adults, a lot of them don't ever figure that out. Especially if its not encouraged culturally.
>>93890805>transformersthe thing is, you're also wrongThe IP can be everything at the same time, its peak was when it was being multiple things. There is no reasson to cut its own market.>>93893347>This data simply does not existthat's probably why they have everyone up to the CEO playing 10 sessions a week hitting his 30-40 player number.
>>93872776>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.Good grief. Are 5heads really so cooked that they use slop to generate their Critical Role imitations?
You mean to tell me that all this time, the dickhead decisions Hasbro/WotC have been making have come down from a guy named Cocks?
>>93872776>Chris CocksThe only reason this isn't the most ridiculous name I've ever seen is because I'm aware of the existence of a tax clerk called Dick Tax.
>>93895372
>>93872806Not interested in soulless games
>>93878438>Why would you try to take that away? Because your imagination is free and always yours. Corporations can't have that.
>>93885050Chris Cocks sells you D&D for a song, what do you do, /tg/?
>>93872776Anons wonder how a Goldman Sachs event can't spot the issue with>I play with probably 30 or 40 people regularly.but don't bat an eye at>It's mostly machine-learning-based AI or proprietary AI>knowledge worker aid>There's not a single person who doesn't use AI somehow... That's a clear signal that we need to be embracing it.>using AI to streamline new player introduction>we've already been using AI...We will deploy it significantly and liberallyIt's because in order to sift through all the meaningless non-sequiturs, misappropriated technical jargon, and oxymorons that pass the first time you listen or read them, you have to be willing to invest time and effort, and you need a wide breadth and variety of knowledge that anons don't have access to.Like why is Cocks talking about knowledge workers? Their business model doesn't need it. Dell would. IBM would. Palo Alto would. But he heard it, and thought "oh that sounds impressive" and added it to his vocabulary.He's a serial confabulator and a mid con artist at best. I don't play D&D and I don't care what he does. I care that he was allowed into a Goldman Sachs event. I would hope that only the most creative, intelligent, and guileful liars are running Wall Street. If I'm forced to play their game if I want to retire, I want the cheaters to do a better job gatekeeping.
>>93895665Imagining I can't reverse what we have right now and I have to make a profit for the shareholders (so no bringing back nudity to the PHB or using it to publish my fabulous 500 page fanfic as official material). I turn Adventure League into the MMO they want so bad. Hire 20 DMs in 6 hour shifts, set a schedule of 2 hour games and have always open online tables divided by level range. Dungeons have lootboxes as prices, as they always did when you roll for treassure. You can pay to have "adventurer packs" of basic items with a chance of getting rare one use items or ultra rare NPC connections (or some other role play thing that can be waived away during an adventure). You get to have one free character and pay for extra ones. Two times a year rent a huge space to have a real life meeting with age divided tables (you can leave your kids playing with other kids) where you can bring your online character and we push merch through gacha like WoW does, mainly to those kids separated from their parents.
>>93873218>AGPLv3Based.
>>93877905>>Beyblades? is anything happening there? No?Actually, yes. Brand new generation where they've kept the exploding gimmick (but it's ratched and plastic friction spring based, so it's cheaper... at least it would be if they weren't doing all metal blades again) and then added the new gimmick of a zipper around the arena that keys into a cog shaped piece on the bey causing it latch on and zoom about at high speed before being flung back into the middle.It's not bad... but because it's G1 of a new generation, they currently look like shit compared to how Burst was looking by the end. (Remember how cheap and horrible G1 Burst looked? Yeah. It's that again.)>>Everything causes them to loss money except D&D/MTG/Monopoly-mobile-gameLast I heard D&D and Magic were both still losing money, just nowhere near as badly as everything else. So they look like success stories by comparison to everything else.>That chart.Holy fucking christ was every fucking luxury goods industry so fucking divorced from the reality around them in 2020 that they thought conditions then were going to be the new normal or fucking something? Even though it plainly, obviously wasn't?
>>93895763Beyblade is licensed to Hasbro, not actually owned by them. If things look dicey for Hasbro, Tomy could pull the license and sell it to someone else instead (or not, depending on the contract). Basically, even if Beyblade were to receive a sudden surge in popularity, it wouldn't necessarily correlate with profits for Hasbro.
>>93895763>Holy fucking christ was every fucking luxury goods industry so fucking divorced from the reality around them in 2020 that they thought conditions then were going to be the new normal or fucking something? Even though it plainly, obviously wasn't?Look if they understood the difference between correlation and causation they'd be in the C-suite of something less mercurial than entertainment media.These buffoons looked at Netflix's ascent as anything other than a well-run, opportunistic killer of a corporation. They forgot that they started by murdering Blockbuster for making mistakes as dumb as Gamestop and Hasbro are making now, then wearing its skin like Buffalo Bill.Idiots often imagine others' success as luck or isolated occurences rather than just a difference in ability or skill. The hyperfixation on the quarantine economy is exactly that - it isn't that it favored certain companies, it's that they were able to adapt and reorganize faster and better. These same idiots blatantly ignore the writers' strike, and how the winners navigated that more deftly too.Do you think that being wealthy makes one immune to scrub mentality? No, you just get to make more braindead dumbass mistakes, and the other rich trust you with money you just wasted more readily than we do with one another.
>>93895884>These buffoons looked at Netflix's ascent as anything other than a well-run, opportunistic killer of a corporationnot all of themNetflix had the syllicon valley model of getting a shit ton of money promising the invent a monopoly. The same thing Amazon and Uber did. But you can't just wish a monopoly into existence, you have to identify a market to obliterate and then spend over a decade doing so with no earnings. The few survivors are the ones that held long enough, so obviously there is no difference between a succesful company and a never ending dump of cash in the eyes of investors.
>>93895931But at the end of the day, there's a difference between a high-functioning sociopath plotting to obliterate a market, and some conman with an awful track record shilling adding AI into a pencils and dice game.If you're an investor you need to be able to tell the difference. The only way Chris Cocks should be allowed anywhere NEAR the Bohemian Grove crowd is as a ritual sacrifice to Moloch to bring another bull market in Q4.
>>93894370You've never worked in and don't understand AI. The annotations are essential. You _need_ the labeling data.
>>93896271so you have someone anotating the recorded games.
>>93896283How many hours of game does "everyone up to the CEO" accrue in a given week? How many cameras per group? How many people does WotC need to employ just for data entry on this project? How likely is it this plan bears fruits? When will WotC see a return on investment? How big will this return be?Seriously it is not impossible. A dedicated community or a company willing to burn money for months on end with dubious chances of success (read: start-up using VC) might pull it off. It is improbable though and for WotC it might as well be impossible.If you think that any form of "AI GM" at all will do the way to go would be play-by-posts. You run into some issues there too (How to transform the data so it fits 5e? Player satisfaction for each action? DMs sent?...) but it could be done. This won't help you solve the two other problems I mentioned though. These will likely be tough for the foreseeable future.
AIs are always shit.I've never seen AI work that wasn't 99.9999% shit.Even the intensively curated AI works are mostly shit.Working with one in real time to be your GM would be the most mind numbing shit next to slave labor in a mine.
>>93872776>Chris Cocks (cocks)>Goldman Sachs (sacks)
>>93897428Know what's worse? Working with several of them at once in real time to make sure they're giving legible and worksafe outputs to paying customers (for 48 hours a week in India).
>>93895763The chart is related to the Entertainment One (EOne) purchase, that again got sold for pennies late last year.>Lets copy Marvel and make a muktiverse without a concrete plan or even understanding our own brands>Because money
>>93873264I want to be social with my AI waifu.
>>93883799Using AI for a background in some shitty promotional art for Secret Lair is not the same as them directly using AI for card art.
>>93897393how about that AI vtuber, isn't it a hobbist propietary model? People cut it a ton of slack and when it does shit wrong it's clipped and shared.as a highlight. Consider all the people proudly sharing AI art that looks like shit as defensively as if they had made it themselves, they would probably tolerate a lot from their AI DM.
>>93895763>Last I heard D&D and Magic were both still losing money, just nowhere near as badly as everything else.Sauce? IIRC those are the only things making them money. But then again, a part of this can be attributed to BD3, and that show is over.>Everything elsePretty much. There is a Transformers movie coming out that's actually pretty good, but no one is talking about it. It needs to make hundreds of millions to make its money back, but I doubt the general audience is even interested after several ''muh dumb action'' flicks, even though Transformers One isn't like that. Meanwhile, little girls like horsefucker generated content more than what Hasbro tosses out, so that's not good for revenue either.
>>93901463I guess if you assume everyone loves slop as much as the crowd that söifaces every time some AI news gets posted then yeah this will "work." Wouldn't be a game I or that many others enjoy though.>>93872776Also come to think of it why would WotC even want AI GMs? Human GMs spend a lot more on books than playtoids. Human GMs introduce others to the hobby and teach the game. They are brand ambassadors. Do they really believe their own propaganda of how this Gm sHoRtAgE is totally a new and unprecedented thing?
>>93893178>>regurgitated images>Yeah ok, retard.NTA, but are you a professional moron, or just a gifted hobbyist? All AI art is cribbed from stolen influences. If it wasn't, I wouldn't be able to specify an artist's style BY NAMEDROPPING THEM and have the AI spit out art with their distinct idiosyncracies.
>>93893723What a whiny bitch.>Waaaaahhh!!! I'm not the target audience for a game I say I don't like! WAAAAHHHHH!!! BABY GO PEEPEE IN DIAPER!
>>93902778All art is cribbed from stolen influences, including basic language. You're literally describing how a baby learns to talk. Better not open your mouth around any ESLs or children, they might steal your ideas about english cadence and conventions.
>>93894370>that's probably why they have everyone up to the CEO playing 10 sessions a week hitting his 30-40 player numberLet's say for five minutes you're correct. The C Suite of Wizards are creatively bankrupt and have already fired all the people who are actually gifted at creating characters and quests, and all of their mediocre bullshit and shitty executive fuckwit ideas are going to be blended into a fine paste, halfway between bland and boring. How is that going to result in a product worth using?
>>93894612Only the useless flaps of skin that make up your corporate masters. The peons tell stories with all of their hearts, pouring their energy into something more unique.
>>93902796A baby learns words, semiotic meaning and uses them in their own voice, they don't speak in pitch perfect psuedo-mimicry of adult sentences in a voice made by merging three different adult voices together, with no real understanding of the words they're using, like the least violent version ever of the alien hunter from Predator.You're thinking of parrots.
>>93901551>Human GMs spend a lot more on books than playtoids. Human GMs introduce others to the hobby and teach the game. They are brand ambassadorsThis is true, although most are unfortunately terrible. Really the play is to sell tools to empower humans to DM more easily, which should increase their numbers. I think that's where the emphasis on using a program to arbitrate all the rules comes from, although that won't be popular with the shitters who like to handwave everything that goes a direction they don't like.
>>93903313>most are unfortunately terrible.Kek>Really the play is to sell tools to empower humans to DM more easily, which should increase their numbers.That is indeed the right play. Fully agree.There are a number of things (oracles, GM-less systems, pairing down their rules, ...) WotC could implement to solve this.>I think that's where the emphasis on using a program to arbitrate all the rules comes fromThis precisely is one of the things AI is incapable of. AI is not a knowledge system. It hallucinates. It will rule inconsistently.
>>93902833>How is that going to result in a product worth using?I never said thatI just said they could spend even more money to farm horrible data.
Hasbro CEO plays games with 20-40 people on the regular? I thought CEOs worked 110 hours per week? Which one is it?
>>93904260Hasbro is toys and games company, his gaming time counts towards his work time (product testing).
>>93872957After the killer 4E fuzzy handcuffs incident, I'm convinced that D&D is some kind of government mkultra psyop and that's why Christians think it's Satanic
>>93904260I think he thinks MMOs are D&D
>>93872776Why does he look like Martin Sheen with a face shrunken by 50% while his head stayed the same size?
>>93911501
>>93906963>the killer 4E fuzzy handcuffs incidentGreentext us, motherfucker.
>>93873492Pretty sure this is just the typical corporate upsell double-speak you do to investors where "using a random name generator" or maybe more charitably "using AI art for a quick landscape or character portrait" is equivocated to being "AI-assistance".
>>93911925The Seattle guy working on 4E online that never happened because he killed his wife and authorities found sex toys in his trunk. Do people not know this?
https://www.nbcboston.com/boston-business-journal/hasbro-considering-moving-headquarters-from-rhode-island-to-boston/3490236/
>>93912938Didn't know about the sex toys.
>>93878308>They are too big to failYou don't know what that term means.
>>93872776>Inside of development, we've already been using AI.>we need to make sure we're clear when something is AI-generated. Are they really clear? I only recall them speaking up on the Bigby book's art after being called out on it.
https://screenrant.com/dnd-ai-controversy-dungeons-and-dragons-fans-hasbro/> Ultimately, AI has become something of a corporate buzzword, and Cocks may simply be invoking it here to ensure investors that Hasbro is hip to the latest technology.
>>93922775>tfw invoked by cocks
>>93872776Who the fuck is this idiot? He seems to know nothing about a wide range of topics, from AI to D&D, that he talks about anyway.
>>93925389Unfortunately he is the HNIC at Whizz-snorters of the Coast. Or was that Chris "Cao Cao" Cao?
>>93921466And again with Magic cards, yes. They've been caught out multiple times, denied it, then been forced to admit it every time.
>>93905543CEOs don't do product testing though. They hire VPs, chair meetings and answer to the board of directors.
>>93872858what if he genuinely plays like 4 separate sessions of dnd per day?
>>93925931In a seperate interview he said it was "3 to 4 times a month", but I don't trust any of these yayo-snorting corporate bastards
>>93923293>Cocks and Sachs
>>93878308Only banks, financial institutions and heavy industry get bailed anon. Toys R Us was far more important than Hasbroke could even hope to be, and they didn't get bailed either.Meanwhile more corpo shenanigans:https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/hasbro-headquarters-boston-move/https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/09/17/metro/hasbro-toys-rhode-island-boston-move-headquarters/https://archive.is/4cMqM>Local Democrat politicians are pleading to Hasbroke to not go away to Boston>Hasbroke willing ''to talk'' (read: they want more financial benefits and hope the Democrats grant them that)Meanwhile, Hasbroke goes full retard:https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hasbro-ceo-goes-all-in-on-kidults-and-gaming-123050774.html>No more kids, adult collectors only!Good cover story for the fact Hasbroke doesn't exist in retail anymore>Be me>Goes to toy store yesterday to pick something up for birthday of nephew>Decide to check if the ''Hasbro no longer in toy store'' story checks out. I'm not an Amerimutt btw, I'm european>Go to XL toy store>Only a few board games, a few Nerf guns (at the bottom, Zuru X-Shot on top, outnumbering them), a few Marvel things and in a corner a forgotten ''horse''. No Transformers, no GI Joe, no Power Rangers, no nothing. Hasbroke made up less than, what, 2% of retail aisle shelf space?Sounds like /toy/ and the horse containment board were right: it's all dogshit now. The fact the new Transformers movie is somewhat decent doesn't change the fact no kid is interested in it anymore.
See, this is why gaming needed to remain outsider art made by people who actually game themselves. Once normies sense an opportunity for profit and a company is publically-traded, you're going to get a bunch of hollow suits in the C-suite parroting the same points about AI and how everything needs to be a subscription service. If nerd hobbies are to survive the enshittification process, we need to rally under privately owned companies run by guys like Gaben who like Plato's philosopher king have cultivated certain virtues that make them deserve to have complete authority.
>>93927591Getting players to buy stuff doesn't even seem that hard. You'd just need a version of Hero Forge that isn't bad.
>>93927591This. If they're publicly traded their loyalty is to the shareholders. Consumers (read quality of products) be damned.Also>"under monetized"Quality journalism right there. Who is this dindoo?
>>93928133Pretty much this. Just become customizable warhammer.
>>93872776"AI" is a meme. We were already using dice and tables for procedural generation, the kind of AI used by D&D would optimally be more complex versions of the same thing.What we need is a better-designed approach to using AI to lighten the workload for DMs, and for getting players more engaged. Because those are the two big bottlenecks for D&D, and for tabletop games in general.
>>93927591nah, the big corpo hooks people in with their marketing teams and then you turn them towards better games.
>>93928851How do you get them to listen to you instead of more marketing?
>blah blah blah AI this AI thatSo? Everyone is throwing around the AI buzzword these days, it means absolutely fuckall.
>>93928885It depends on them. Usually when I'm hooked on a system I can sell it fine, but some people have their own personal issues keeping them from trying other stuff and they have to deal with that themselves. Something I find a lot is people assuming everything will be as demanding as 5e and demand the system mastery standarized with 3e, so they don't want to sink even more time on a slight variation of the same. Usually they can be convinced with a solid one shot.
>>93928901It's still up in the air whether this is empty trend-chasing to bait investors or if he's stupid enough to actually follow through with it.
>>93928816Everything in this post is true. Straight to the point. Flawless victory.
