Generative AI has gotten its deep learning tentacles into many parts of gaming life, and tabletop is no exception—take Dungeons & Dragons for example. While Wizards of the Coast has endured controversy after controversy for accidentally putting AI art in sourcebooks, and has a , Hasbro's CEO Chris Cocks has been on the record as, uh, .
Which is why I've found myself pleasantly surprised to find out that Andrew Clayton, creator of the , has a two-boots-in-the-dirt hardline stance against AI, as per an earlier this week.
If you're playing any TTRPG online—be it D&D, Pathfinder 2nd edition, Blades in the Dark, whatever—chances are you might've done so on Foundry. It's a little pricier and harder to set up when compared to something like Roll20, but makes up for it in spades with customisation, thanks to player-made modules you can slot into your game.
While the entire interview is interesting, Clayton very much speaks as the head of a company might—nothing overly corpo, but it's all fairly polished and media-trained. When asked about AI, though? It's a text interview, so I'm assuming a bit of tone here, but the word choice is downright stern.
"My own personal stance on this is that AI generated content remains—for the foreseeable future—an exploitative technology that unfairly harvests the intellectual property of artists, writers, and designers to produce soulless and derivative works without their consent," Clayton says.
"Until the legal and ethical challenges of generative AI are more adequately addressed—and I don’t foresee this happening—I don’t think generative AI can be responsibly employed in our industry without it being a betrayal of the creative people who made the TTRPG industry what it is in the first place."
And while I won't lose sleep over those same players AI-generating artwork or writing for their home games, the key difference is that they're supporting tools that—as Clayton says—are actively making money off scraping the internet and using real, actual human work without consent.
Hasbro's Chris Cocks has been effusive about AI in tabletop, a stance that's at odds with the rest of the industry—including WoTC's business partners, [[link]] apparently. Wizards of the Coast has its own policies, and I'd be surprised if anyone working there was jazzed about the concept, but the truth is Hasbro owns WoTC and a Hasbro executive will, invariably, have the final say.