Foundry VTT creator does what Hasbro won't with D&D, trashes the idea of AI in tabletop roleplaying game industry as a 'betrayal'

A group of bandits sweep into a tavern to viciously interrogate its subjects in the D&D 2024 monster manual.

(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast - Art by Katerina Ladon.)

Generative AI has gotten its deep learning tentacles into many parts of gaming life, and tabletop is no exception—take Dungeons & Dragons for example. While Wizards of the Coast has endured controversy after controversy for accidentally putting AI art in sourcebooks, and has a generally anti-AI stance, Hasbro's CEO Chris Cocks has been on the record as, uh, not doing that.

Which is why I've found myself pleasantly surprised to find out that Andrew Clayton, creator of the virtual tabletop software Foundry, has a two-boots-in-the-dirt hardline stance against AI, as per an interview with RPGDrop earlier this week.

If you're playing any TTRPG online—be it D&D, Pathfinder 2nd edition, Blades in the Dark, whatever—chances are you might've done so on Foundry. It's a little pricier and harder to set up when compared to something like Roll20, but makes up for it in spades with customisation, thanks to player-made modules you can slot into your game.

While the entire interview is interesting, Clayton very much speaks as the head of a company might—nothing overly corpo, but it's all fairly polished and media-trained. When asked about AI, though? It's a text interview, so I'm assuming a bit of tone here, but the word choice is downright stern.

"My own personal stance on this is that AI generated content remains—for the foreseeable future—an exploitative technology that unfairly harvests the intellectual property of artists, writers, and designers to produce soulless and derivative works without their consent," Clayton says.

"Until the legal and ethical challenges of generative AI are more adequately addressed—and I don’t foresee this happening—I don’t think generative AI can be responsibly employed in our industry without it being a betrayal of the creative people who made the TTRPG industry what it is in the first place."

This is a far cry from the aforementioned words of Hasbro's CEO, who late last year talked a big game about "significantly and liberally" using AI, adding that his apparent 30-40 fellow D&D-ers (I guess he's in a West Marches campaign or something) had all been drinking from the well of deep learning: "There's not a single person who doesn't use AI somehow for either campaign development or character development or story ideas. That's a clear signal that we need to be embracing it."

And while I won't lose sleep over those same players AI-generating artwork or writing for their home games, the key difference is that they're supporting tools that—as Clayton says—are actively making money off scraping the internet and using real, actual human work without consent.

I should make a counterpoint here, though. While Foundry VTT doesn't have officially-supported AI integration, I have seen modules that make use of AI in circulation before. These are modules created by players, and I wouldn't ask Foundry VTT to ruthlessly moderate them, but it is worth noting that this is Clayton's personal stake. Foundry, the company, is hardline against AI, but the people using Foundry aren't necessarily stopped from doing so.

Hasbro's Chris Cocks has been effusive about AI in tabletop, a stance that's at odds with the rest of the industry—including WoTC's business partners, apparently. Wizards of the Coast has its own policies, and I'd be surprised if anyone working there was jazzed about the concept, but the truth is Hasbro owns WoTC and a Hasbro executive will, invariably, have the final say.

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Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.

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