It’s no secret that the MTG community has been vehemently against AI since its inception. Thanks to Magic: The Gathering being home to many of the world’s most beautiful artworks, this opposition is well-founded. In an effort to protect the artists who have animated Magic’s world for the last three decades, players have pushed back against any AI addition to MTG, and Wizards of the Coast has listened.
Thanks to player pushback, Wizards of the Coast has repeatedly made it clear that AI is not used at any stage of Magic: The Gathering’s development. While that appears to remain true, a recent announcement has revealed that an AI update is on its way for Spelltable: a Wizards of the Coast-owned MTG platform that lets players play tabletop MTG remotely. While the change is intended to improve moderation of bad actors on the platform, there is some reasonable concern from the player base.
AI Moderation
In a recent article released by Wizards of the Coast, it was announced that a pilot program for Spelltable will be rolled out with an upcoming update. In an effort to solve an evolving moderation issue with the platform, Wizards of the Coast plans to use an AI service from ggwp.com that “utilizes voice recording and artificial intelligence to highlight and alert speech that may be harmful and elevate it to our customer service team for review.” According to Wizards, the software “has been used by other gaming companies to meaningfully reduce online harassment.” In the words of some Spelltable players, player moderation is an issue that needs attention.
While the use of AI is facing massive pushback from the community, concerns about moderation are so severe that some players are supportive of this change. Making online spaces safe for everyone, especially with a community as varied as MTG’s, is undeniably a problem that should be taken seriously. Similar software is so widely used for online moderation now that some players were surprised that Spelltable didn’t already have something like this.
If Wizards of the Coast’s word is to be taken, the use of this moderation software, in theory, should be harmless. Human moderators will make all the final decisions, Wizards of the Coast still isn’t using AI in MTG’s development, and the information collected should adhere to the company’s previous policies. This is, for the time being, a sort of test run, too, meaning that there’s no guarantee that Wizards of the Coast will be using AI monitoring forever.
The problem with all this, thanks to past events, is that trust between Wizards of the Coast and the community has eroded. The original change to the current Secret Lair limited print model, for example, was made to improve shipping. Now, the changes have caused multiple terrible sales experiences for players, while Wizards of the Coast continues to cash out. Considering this, players are reasonably concerned that all of the reassurances in this article are just empty promises.
Mass Pushback
Despite promising to implement measures to prevent it, many players remain concerned that the AI software will ultimately make decisions that directly lead to bans anyway. This could end up wreaking havoc, thanks to many of the phrases commonly thrown around in a Commander game. When taken out of context, ‘killing a player,’ for example, could easily be a reasonable phrase to ban someone for. Even if humans make the decisions, there’s equal concern that the software’s moderators will just approve whatever the AI flags.
There’s also a legitimate concern about what will happen to all the voice recordings the AI software collects. While the recordings from Spelltable should theoretically be of low value, they could still be sold to third parties. That said, despite player concern, there is no confirmation that recorded information will be sold.
Even if Wizards of the Coast is using the AI tool exactly as they highlighted in the article, there arguably isn’t even a need for it. Considering that the company just had its best year ever, it could afford to expand the team of human moderators behind Spelltable to manually expand their moderation system. While that would solve the problem, it’s likely more expensive than using this AI software, making this decision feel like a cost-cutting measure above all else.
Regardless of what happens, Wizards of the Coast making this AI-related announcement at all was enough for many to start recommending alternatives. There are plenty of competitors to Spelltable in the ecosystem that have glowing recommendations from the playerbase, and many are more than ready to move following the AI update.
The Beginning of AI in Magic?
Even outside of Spelltable’s community, some MTG players are concerned that AI is being used in any aspect of the game. Magic may not use AI in its development process, but Hasbro, Wizards of the Coast’s parent company, is an avid fan of it. Thanks to this, many players are concerned that this Spelltable AI addition will be the beginning of Wizards of the Coast normalizing AI processes in Magic. Universes Beyond also received massive backlash in the beginning. Now, it takes up half of the yearly release calendar. It was never supposed to be a part of Standard, either.
Hopefully, if this AI update is implemented despite the backlash, the software is used only for moderation, and the human moderators behind it spend time making meaningful decisions. The tool could do some real good for the Spelltable community, but the risks for Magic as a franchise certainly feel enormous.
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