Cynicism about artificial intelligence is here, but it is unevenly distributed. There is not enough scepticism about the technology’s applicability in a variety of fields in the business world, and too little awareness of how transformative it can be, and indeed already is being, for states. More scepticism should be applied to how usefully AI can be deployed in creative fields. Chris Cocks, the chief executive of the entertainment conglomerate Hasbro, which owns among other things the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, recently made some eyebrow-raising and self-contradictory remarks about the use of AI in his own field.

He believes that century-old companies like his own have an advantage today because large language models and generative AI work more effectively the more information you can feed them, and “legacy” companies like Hasbro have plenty of information. Or, as Cocks put it: “D&D has 50 years of content that we can mine. Literally thousands of adventures that we’ve created, probably tens of millions of words we own and can leverage.”

There’s a tension here: Cocks is arguing both that the use of AI will reward large organisations which have their own data and resources with which to feed it, and that the costs of using it will remain low enough for this to be worthwhile. But for the likes of Hasbro to have a structural advantage in the age of AI, copyright and intellectual property will have to be strictly enforced. This has implications for both the cost and effectiveness of the technology. In evidence given to the UK House of Lords, OpenAI warned that it is “impossible” to train AI without the use of copyrighted materials.