As the world continues to slowly but surely grapple with the issues with, and ever-present executive demand for, generative AI use in every aspect of our lives, sometimes it’s nice to hear at least one CEO seemingly step back from their previous gung-ho approach to the technology.
This executive rarity comes in the form of Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks, who had previously espoused the belief back in late 2024 that, as someone who already heavily utilized AI platforms in his own personal games of Dungeons & Dragons, the technology’s integration into the game was “inevitable.” Now, at least, Cocks has seemingly cooled a bit on that assumption, even as generative AI has continued to advance and push for adoption across almost every aspect of our lives.
“There are some brands that the audience, the creators, just don’t want it,” Cocks recently told Verge’s Decoder podcast. “So we don’t even have it in our pipelines for our video games or for Magic: The Gathering or D&D.”
Cocks went on to describe generative AI usage in the creative process as “a bit of ‘garbage in, garbage out,’” before adding that ultimately “it’s humans who inspire the good ideas and follow through on them.”
While it’s good to see that Cocks himself has at least accepted that claims of inevitability were never going to work out for wary, skeptical fanbases like the ones D&D and Magic have, both games have already had anti-AI guidelines for a while now—and both came after public backlashes to early experimental use of the technology in products and marketing that were vociferously pushed back on by audiences.
D&D came first, in the wake of a major public embarrassment when it was revealed in summer 2023 that several pieces of artwork in the Fifth Edition sourcebook Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants by Illya Shkipin had been partially created with generative AI. The controversy ultimately saw Glory of the Giants reprinted with replacement art, as well as the establishment of guidelines expressly forbidding the use of generative AI by D&D creatives at any stage of their processes.
Later that same year, Wizards of the Coast announced that the Magic: The Gathering team had likewise adopted those guidelines, only to have to apologize a month later when marketing art for the then-upcoming Ravnica Remastered set utilized generative AI elements that Wizards originally defended as human-created.
While Cocks himself is free to use generative AI in his own home games of D&D—and still does, telling Verge, “There is so much AI-based animation, images, text, sound effects, and voice cloning on my PC, it would floor you”—at least it’ll be staying out of Wizards’ products themselves for a good while yet.
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