The Gathering and D&D Artist Calls Out Hasbro CEO’s AI Comments

Artist Denman Rooke threatens to stop working with Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast after Hasbro CEO’s statements regarding AI.

In a March 15 X thread, Rooke published an email sent to art directors he has previously worked under at Wizards of the Coast. Rooke, who has created artwork for both Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, responded to statements made by Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks about the company’s purported “R&D efforts around AI,” which included referring to the latter property as “50 years of content we can mine.”

“If Chris Cocks or anyone else in senior positions at Hasbro or Wizards of the Coast thinks the works I or other artists, art directors, writers, dungeon masters or creative humans have poured into these games are ‘content that we can mine’ with AI, then I will have to take my future creative energy elsewhere,” Rooke wrote. “Hopefully Wizards will not head down this route,” he continued, “I hope this email is one of numerous that other artists have sent in, so hopefully it will put pressure on senior decision makers.”

Cocks’ statements came during a March 1 interview with GamesBeat. In describing the potential that Hasbro has to scrape its various properties for AI-generated content, Cocks named Dungeons & Dragons alongside other IPs, including Magic: The Gathering. “Magic: The Gathering has been around for 35 years, more than 15,000 cards we can use in something like that,” Cocks stated. “Peppa Pig has been around for 20 years and has hundreds of thousands of hours of published content we can leverage.”

The statements come less than two months after Wizards of the Coast’s January incident involving AI-generated artwork that was used in one of the company’s promotional campaigns for Magic: The Gathering. Wizards of the Coast was derided by fans who had accused the company of publishing AI promo materials on social media, which the company denied, only for Wizards to almost immediately retract their statement. Instead, Wizards of the Coast noted that the image in question was supplied by “a vendor,” and that they remain dedicated to not publishing any work made by artificial intelligence moving forward.

Source: X