Hasbro CEO still has ‘so much AI-based’ grist in his own D&D games ‘it would floor you’, but he’s not putting it in MTG cards or D&D books because people ‘just don’t want it’

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.

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.

Either way, this aversion is something Cocks seems to recognise from the fanbase as a whole, and while many other segments of Hasbro are using AI for concepting toys, which Cocks claims are trained on their own IP to make “pretty sophisticated renderings pretty fast of products and ideas”, the gamers? The gamers aren’t interested.

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“From a creative context, I think you have to think about it very carefully. 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’s still mostly bright-eyed and a little naive about the tech, though: “If Joe or Sally Sixpack feels like they’re suddenly like an avant-garde creative with these powerful tools, take a legitimate avant-garde creative and give them these tools, and they just level it up way more.”

Aside from the obvious corporate ick of placing the phrase “level up” next to “avant-garde”, Cocks’ assertion here just hasn’t really played out. In the world of capitalist grinding, where you need to ‘deliver leveled up products for a smoother more agile pipeline’ or whatever, sure. Using AI in the very early stages might save you a couple of hours.

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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.

“But people were writing about the demise of the music industry back in 2000 with the rise of Napster. And I think, last I heard, the music industry is more profitable than ever because they figured out a way through it.”

When Patel very astutely points out that the music industry is more profitable than ever for a few specific companies and not, you know, most of the people who make music, Cocks lists off a spiel about the genie being out of the bottle, and adds: “You either accept that and you figure out how you work with it, or you don’t accept that, and I think it’s probably going to be an even bigger negative for you.”

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.