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State of Play: Kobold Press Issues the No AI Pledge

State of Play: Kobold Press Issues the No AI Pledge

Kobold Press CEO and Kobold-in-Chief, Wolfgang Baur, is here to give you some insight on the state of the industry!

Both as the Kobold Press CEO and as a game designer, I’m pleased to say that Kobold Press’s policy on AI is simple and direct: 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.

The term AI is simply everywhere in the news right now. It’s in Dungeons & Dragons. It’s baked into new US Department of Defense drones. It’s rejecting health insurance claims, creating phony travel guides, and judging unemployment insurance in Nevada.

In many of those cases, it is clearly doing the job worse than humans do. It’s not the right tool for every job. Given its error rates in health care such as medical imaging, it’s barely the right tool for any job.

We should be skeptical about AI snake oil. It’s not useless, but it’s also not miraculous. And in some places, it simply doesn’t belong at all.

Your Brain is the Generator

The staff at Kobold Press doesn’t think AI belongs in generating art, roleplaying, or storytelling. Making your game your own is the heart of the RPG hobby: creating your world, your character, and your story with friends. Frankly, we’ve seen LLM text prompts work ok for chatbots. But we play RPGs to play with our friends, not software.

The Kobold policy against AI has been in place since the rise of Midjourney and similar tools in 2022. We looked at them, learned that they were trained on images that ripped off working artists and violated their copyrights, and rejected them as unethical tools that require theft from creatives.

Art director Marc Radle and the entire creative team are incredibly proud of the artists and cartographers who produce the amazing images, characters, creatures, maps, and scenes published by Kobold Press. We believe in their talent and their vision, and we plan to continue hiring artists to create Kobold Press covers, maps, and interior art to the highest possible standard. No AI-generated art or maps are permitted in our game books.

For game design, we hold the same position. Kobold Press believes in empowering players and game masters with tools (such as the upcoming Encounter Builder tool) that enable your game to run well.

But the emphasis is on your game, not a machine-generated GM or a set of prompts for a design built on LLM training on clear infringement of existing work. The spark of every GM’s creativity doesn’t glow any brighter with AI. None of our game design is generated with AI, and we aim to keep it that way.

Kobold Press believes that tabletop is about fueling everyone to do their own creation and have the joy of making something unique to them. Tabletop games connect players with original stories, and we aim to use human designed, developed, and playtested materials to strengthen every home game. It should always be fun and entertaining to host your own game nights. AI is not required to run your game, and it is not required to design it.

If you support Kobold Press in this policy, please feel free to sign below in support.

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Beth Ball

Grove Guardian Press (D&D Duet)

Jean-Yves Boulais

Petra Alanis

Roxane Lapa

Collin Worster

Thomas Limp

Daniel Trujillo

Gabin Olivier

Ben McFarland

Jay Kilian

Todd Stigliano

Kevin Fox

Matthew Rhine

Douglas Hayes

Vedder Press

Peter Beketov

Thomas Barclay

Sarah Conner's Shotgun (for dealing with AIs)

rob blumenberg

Title/Prefix*

Clayton Thomson

Robert Ahrens

Alvin Loi

Jason Nyquist

World Tree

Amy Crittenden

Jonathan Ball

DnD Duet

Isaac Stephanus

Mark Hurley

Narrow Seas Fabrications

Scott McNeil

Faith Elisabeth Lilley

World Tree LLC

R P Davis

Kabouter Games

James Kidd

RPG Familiar

Bryan Newlun

Constantine Belegris

Em M

Artist, writer, and Forever DM who believes human creativity is worth fighting for

Andrew Beard

Eric Wightman

The Arwyrm Adventuring Party &Hunt Igbane Demon Slayers

Jacob Vardy

JKV Games

Wess Tester

TS Luikart

Cubicle 7

David Brideau

Salvatore Privitera

Christopher Alvarez

Jeffrey Stricker

Andrew Newhook

Steven Larson

Darren West

Studio 404 Games

Mike Gehrke

Nicholas Tursi

Jason King

Matthias Esch

Delta Starfire

Sam Littell

Ash Hames

Joshua Davis

Jade Davies

John C Park

Robin Fjärem

Lindsay Belton

Ivan Compagnoni

Michael Parman

Michael Hansen

Jennifer Bruce

Red Fox Illustration

Jarrod Camiré

Michael Miller

The Arcane Gearsmith

Lillen Art

Illustrator

D.D. O'Brien

Cort Carpenter

Trevor Deslatte

Keith Hershey jr.

Ominous Glow Games

Thomas Jones

Morgan V

Adverse Reactions

Ed Bell

DrunkardsAndDragons.com

Chris Martin

Unstabletop

Jay Newman

Andrew Durston

The Campaign Nook

Robert Bridges

Stephen Allain

Ulf Hässelbäck

Darrell Ottery

Eclectic Games

Christopher Larkin

David Rempel

Rempelstiltskin Productions LLC

David Mathews

Linda Buth

Gary Francisco

Nicholas Monitto

Kevin Heath

John Payne

Julien Pirou

Empyreal Media Productions

Amund Christensen

Golden Age comics and Collectibles

Jeff Tinevez

youtube.com/itsNket

Kenneth Smith

Hannah Dietrich

Cave Gaming LLC

Brandon Dietrich

Cave Gaming LLC

William Kramer

Philippe Marcil

Alex Mewett

Kain Hernandez

Caleb Benson

Steven Lithway

BDL Heating and Cooling

Bjørn Røyrvik

Spencer Lee

Jeremy Scrimes

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