Wolfgang Baur, CEO at DnD rival Kobold Press, has emphatically reiterated the company’s policy that AI generated art and text are not welcome in its products. He published the remarks on Thursday, questioning both the usefulness and morality of a technology which Habsro CEO Chris Cocks recently lauded as the future of Dungeons and Dragons.
Writing in a state of play blogpost, Baur cites Dungeons and Dragons as one among many areas of life where the news has been dominated by potential or actual uses of AI, alongside “new US Department of Defense drones”, “rejecting health insurance claims, creating phony travel guides, and judging unemployment insurance in Nevada”.
He states that in many of those cases “it is clearly doing the job worse than humans do”. Referencing an article in the academic journal Radiology, which demonstrates that human radiographers are prone to trust results from an AI scanning system even when they’re inaccurate, Baur says “given its error rates in health care such as medical imaging, it’s barely the right tool for any job”.
“The Kobold policy against AI has been in place since the rise of Midjourney and similar tools in 2022”, Baur states. He says that after the team “learned that they were trained on images that ripped off working artists and violated their copyrights”, the team “rejected them as unethical tools that require theft from creatives”.
“We plan to continue hiring artists to create Kobold Press covers, maps, and interior art to the highest possible standard”, Baur pledges, before stating “no AI-generated art or maps are permitted in our game books”. He later adds “none of our game design is generated with AI, and we aim to keep it that way”.
While Baur is not, explicitly, responding to the claims recently made by Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks about AI’s future use in DnD, those remarks were widely reported on and the RPG fandom is well aware of them. Kobold Press has a history of capitalising on Wizards of the Coast’s unpopular moves, such as when it announced its own successor to DnD 5th edition, ‘Tales of the Valiant‘ in the wake of the DnD Open Gaming License fiasco in 2023.
In Chris Cocks statement to investors, he acknowledges that AI tools were being used in production workflows in some capacity at Wizards of the Coast. But the main thrust of his enthusiasm was directed at hypothetical AI-generation tools that could be used by players or GMs for story ideation, rules learning, or more.
Baur says “Kobold Press believes in empowering players and game masters with tools… that enable your game to run well”. But “the emphasis is on your game, not a machine-generated GM or a set of prompts for a design built on [Large Language Model] training on clear infringement of existing work”.
While Baur makes concrete criticisms of the legality and morality of AI driven tools, some of his remarks criticise the technology’s potential impact on the culture of roleplaying. Baur states: “Kobold Press believes that tabletop is about fueling everyone to do their own creation and have the joy of making something unique to them”. He adds “AI is not required to run your game, and it is not required to design it.”.
By taking a moral stance on a contentious technology that WotC seems poised to adopt, Baur may be doing more to recommend Kobold’s 5e successor Tales of the Valiant to frustrated customers than anything in the games rules themselves. Every DnD-like RPG has its own take on the DnD classes and DnD races, but minute rules differences don’t inspire fan loyalty – a clear moral stance might.
Source: Wargamer
