Hasbro Unit Bans A.I.-Generated Art Amid D&D Fan Concerns

The Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game series has stated that it will not permit artists to create its cast of sorcerers, druids, and other characters and scenery using artificial intelligence technology.

D&D artwork is meant to be fantastical. However, at least one ax-wielding giant turned off some admirers, who asked whether it was artificial on social media.

It was not until Saturday that Hasbro-owned D&D Beyond learned that an illustrator it has collaborated with for almost a decade employed artificial intelligence to create commissioned artwork for an upcoming book.

D&D Beyond produces online tools and other related content for the series. Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro company that manages the series, said in a statement that it has spoken with the artist and is clarifying its policies.

“He will not use AI for Wizards’ work moving forward,” read a post on D&D Beyond’s X, formerly Twitter, account. “We are revising our process and updating our artist guidelines to make it clear that artists must refrain from using AI art generation as part of their art creation process for developing D&D.”

Today’s AI-generated imagery frequently displays noticeable defects, like deformed limbs, which piqued the interest of skeptical D&D players.

Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast did not respond to requests for additional information on Sunday. Last year, Hasbro paid $146.3 million for D&D Beyond. The Rhode Island-based toy company has owned Wizards of the Coast for over two decades.

The artwork appears in a soon-to-be-released hardcover book of monster descriptions and legend titled “Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants.” The digital and paper versions of the package will be available for $59.95 on the D&D website on August 15th.

The use of AI tools to assist in creative work has raised copyright and labor concerns in many industries, contributing to the Hollywood strike, prompting the Recording Academy to revise its Grammy Awards protocols, and producing some visual artists to sue AI companies for ingesting their work without their consent to build image-generators that anyone can use.

Mattel, Hasbro’s rival, employed AI-generated graphics to assist in producing concepts for new Hot Wheels toy cars, though it has yet to reveal whether this was more than an experiment.