With AI everywhere, and especially in the wake of Hasbro/WotC’s AI aims, Kobold Press has issued a “No AI Pledge” to the delight of gamers.
In the wake of Hasbro/WotC’s comments about how AI is something you’re going to see more of in D&D, Kobold Press has come down hard, issuing a No AI Pledge for the company. Kobold Press CEO and Kobold-in-Chief Wolfgang Baur came out swinging on Kobolds blog, and we are, frankly, here for it.
Kobold Press – No AI, No Way, No How
First up, here’s the pledge, and it’s as plain as the kind of yogurt that Tim Walz has for breakfast every Tuesday:
“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.”
That’s it. It’s that simple. No qualifying. No “I play D&D with like 30-40 people on the regular, and trust me they all use AI so it’s what the consumers want, so really we’re just doing what you told us to do so you can’t be mad”—just “yeah AI doesn’t fix things the way people think.”
And it really doesn’t. If you haven’t been following the news, AI not only is increasingly wrong, it’s also absurdly expensive. Both in terms of the cost to implement it as well as the power that it takes to run the machines. And all so that you can get a computer to be wrong at you about Faerun, travel, or the health benefits of taking a bath with a toaster.
“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.
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.”
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That latter point is true. AI-generated art and text all is built on the work of humans. Often taken without permission or compensation—many companies have argued that AI couldn’t exist without violating copyright and stealing work from others.
So when Kobold Press says that none of their game design is generated with AI and that they aim to keep it that way, it’s easy to understand why it’s not just a big deal, but also a good thing for games.
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.
Hopefully this is just the first of many such pledges
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