Corporate AI will save creatives for last

Kobold Press’ CEO Wolfgang Baur released a statement yesterday repledging the publisher’s stance against using generative AI technology to create its popular D20-based tabletop RPGs. It was everything you might hope from a leadership statement: direct, unequivocable, and impassioned. It left no room to wonder whether Kobold Press and its new Tales of the Valiant system might weasel between sentences in a few years’ time. But, like many recent statements, it’s missing a key component.

“We don’t use generative AI art, we don’t use AI to generate text for our game design, and we don’t believe that AI is magical pixie dust that makes your tabletop games better,” Baur wrote. He obviously understands the effect AI would have not only on his own business but also the wider world—he later mentions burgeoning military and governance applications with disastrous consequences alongside its error-riddled performance within medical imaging.