Earlier this week a job listing on LinkedIn caught the eyes of fans of Dungeons & Dragons and Magic The Gathering as Wizards of the Coast was hiring for a Principal AI Engineer. It's not the first time AI has raised eyebrows as some artwork featured in Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants had AI involvement, the potential for AI has also caused wrongful witchhunt in the past too, most recently with artwork from the Dungeons & Dragons 2024 Players Handbook.
The Principal AI Engineer job listing, posted a week ago, announces that they're "looking for someone who believes that crafting high-value, shared technology to accelerate creation and testing of content with [Machine Learning] systems engineering is key to delivering high-quality player experiences."
Parts of the job listing that the internet is (rightfully) voicing their concerns about are that in the role this employee will "Design, build, and deploy systems for intelligent generation of text dialog, audio, art assets, NPC behaviors, and real time bot frameworks."
Reaching out to Wizards of the Coast TechRaptor received the following statement from Wizards of the Coast:
“Our stance on AI hasn't changed. This job description is for a role for future video game projects. You can reference our AI FAQ here.”
A key quote from their policy includes "we require artists, writers, and creatives contributing to the Magic TCG and the D&D TTRPG to refrain from using AI generative tools to create final Magic or D&D products."
With the provided statement and their AI Art FAQ Wizards of the Coast is drawing a very clear line in the sand between their stance on AI use in Artworks, primarily when it comes to Dungeons & Dragons as well as Magic: The Gathering, and for AI use in other aspects of product development.
It was only last month that it was announced that Larian, developers of the wildly popular Baldur's Gate III, would not be creating any DLC for Baldur's Gate III and would also not be working on future installments in the Baldur's Gate franchise. We also began hearing the stirrings of Wizards of the Coast putting $1B into development of their own Video Games.
