A job posting by Wizards of the Coast went viral on social media over the weekend, highlighting some consumers’ lack of enthusiasm for generative artificial intelligence, as well as the continuing fallout from some of Wizards’ recent controversies.
At the end of May, Renton, Wash.-based Wizards placed a listing on LinkedIn for a principal AI engineer. The senior position is on a team that Wizards is building to “create high-value software and processes in direct support of our development teams,” the company wrote in the posting. The role will explore the use of AI programs in “game development, asset creation, and automated frameworks.”
The job post led to widespread speculation among fans of the Wizards games Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering that Wizards was about to revise its previously stated stance on AI-generated material for its card and board games.
“Our stance on AI hasn’t changed,” a Wizards of the Coast representative told GeekWire. “This job description is for a role for future video game projects.”
The same representative directed us to the Generative AI art FAQ on the official D&D website. According to it, artists, writers, and creatives are expected to refrain from using gen-AI programs to “create final Magic or D&D products.”
Wizards’ parent company Hasbro is currently investing heavily in internal video game development, following the successes of last year’s Baldur’s Gate 3 and Monopoly Go.
While AI has a bad reputation in many fields for enabling bad actors to create floods of zero-effort dross, game developers have found multiple applications for the technology that don’t replace creatives’ efforts. Against that backdrop, it’s not surprising that Hasbro would want an AI engineer on their core team.
The latest dustup highlights a simmering issue of trust between Wizards and its core audience. The company has gone through multiple AI-related controversies in the last couple of years, the most recent of which involved an AI-generated image that appeared in a social media campaign for Magic.
More importantly, Wizards is still suffering from the hit its reputation took in January 2023 when it briefly tried to deauthorize and replace its Open Game License (OGL), which is what allows third-party designers to create D&D content for profit.
The argument seems to be that if Wizards was willing to quietly overturn the OGL, which is the basis of a small industry, then anything else the company says is equally subject to change. That includes its gen-AI policies.
That was further inflamed by a March 1 interview with Hasbro CEO and former Wizards president Chris Cocks, where he discussed the potential use cases for generative AI trained on D&D and Magic’s decades of history. It’s led to a cynical sense among fans that it’s not a question of if we’ll see AI-generated D&D content, but when.
In other D&D news, Wizards is currently celebrating the game’s 50th anniversary with a lineup of new books and brand crossovers, which includes the appearance of longtime D&D archvillain Vecna as a killer in the asymmetrical horror game Dead by Daylight.
Vecna also returned to the game line in the recent release Vecna: Eve of Ruin, a crossover adventure that takes players across the D&D multiverse. It feels like a swan song for the current edition of the game, which will be effectively overhauled later this year with redesigned versions of the three core books.
The next major D&D release is a nonfiction book. The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons: 1970-1977 tracks the early days of American tabletop gaming, and the scene in Lake Geneva that led Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson to collaborate on what eventually became D&D. It’s planned for release on June 18.
