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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