🎙️ The AI Innovations Bringing Hasbro's Characters to Life

Hasbro’s Gray Bright joins us for Episode 14 of The Speakeasy, delving into how the company’s new AI studio, Sixth Wall, is bringing its iconic characters to life. Gray tells Joe and Gabriella about their ‘behavioural licensing’ and ‘golden record’ keeps characters in canon, in lore, and consistent no matter where they come alive.

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Gray Bright didn't set out to reinvent how intellectual property works. He joined Hasbro in 2019 to lead board game design. But when ChatGPT arrived, Gray found himself at the centre of something far bigger: figuring out what it means for Hasbro's most beloved characters to actually come alive in the age of AI.

The result is Sixth Wall, a new entity within Hasbro, and its infrastructure is already operational. As Gray puts it: "We are open for business. This is no longer just hypothetical. We are delivering these experiences."

The earliest experiments were modest. Gray's team explored whether LLMs could generate new Trivial Pursuit questions, but something unexpected happened: they started playing the tool rather than using it. That insight led to Trivial Pursuit Infinite, an AI-powered version that let the public ask questions on any topic. Then a software engineer named Jim Heys walked in and said he thought he could speak to dead people. What he really meant was that by connecting an LLM to a Ouija board, and wiring it so the planchette physically moved, he had created something genuinely uncanny.

Over Halloween, Hasbro ran the experience for 72 hours and logged 250,000 interactions. The team realised they weren't experimenting with productivity tools anymore, they were creating new kinds of experiences.

The next question was inevitable: what happens when we talk to our characters?

The first attempt was an unbranded fox, given a British accent and a rough personality. It worked technically, but something was missing. There was no immediate recognition, no sense of who this character was or what it should say. Then they tried Peppa. The moment she started talking about muddy puddles, everything clicked. Decades of accumulated character history, the voice, the cadence, the emotional familiarity millions of families carry, meant the AI experience landed in a completely different way.

This is the insight that underpins Sixth Wall: the reason to start with iconic IP isn't brand conservatism, it's that the IP is doing real work in the interaction that a new character simply cannot replicate.

Though the team decided not to continue with Peppa - they’re focusing on over 13 experiences only - it was an important step in the broader experimentation phase about what resonates.

Traditional licensing is a before-the-moment business. You construct deals ahead of time, specify where a character will appear, and approve assets. But a character speaking in real time to millions of people simultaneously is a fundamentally different proposition. Without proper infrastructure, an LLM asked to be Peppa Pig might, as Gray discovered, respond to "do you like bacon?" in ways that edge uncomfortably close to cannibalism.

Behavioural licensing is the category Sixth Wall created to solve this, and as Gray points out, it simply didn't exist before.

The solution has three layers. The character operating system is the technical stack allowing a character to think, hear, speak, see and act. The golden record locks a character's personality, lore and moderation parameters. The application layer defines the specific environment a character is deployed into. Moderation runs in both directions: what goes in is screened, what comes out is screened.

For example, Optimus Prime on a consumer website versus Optimus Prime as the receptionist of Hasbro's new Boston office are the same character but in different contexts, with the same underlying golden record, and moderation. He stays in character and acts according to the environment he’s in.

While Hasbro was building internally, something was happening externally. Their characters were being brought to life already, off-brand and out of canon.

The instinct for most IP owners in this position is legal: cease and desists and whack-a-mole takedown enforcement.

Hasbro's read was different; yes, the infringement was happening, but they also took it as a signal that there was a demand for interaction with these characters, and no authorised version existed. Their response was to build canonical AI versions of their characters so that they not only met Hasbro’s expectations but so talent could be properly compensated, too.

A clear illustration of what the golden record enables is Hasbro Radio, a 24-hour internal station where the characters are the DJs. Colonel Mustard runs late-night jazz and unsolved mysteries. Mr. Monopoly delivers live stock price announcements connected to real exchanges. Megatron’s reaction to Gray’s request of ‘Wonderwall’ was a perfect example of the golden record in action, delivering a spontaneous in-character moment.

All of this proved that rather than constraining characters, the infrastructure has liberated them. It allows them to behave consistently and safely without anyone having to script every interaction, which opens up a huge breadth of possibilities for how they can be used.

Sixth Wall is now open to partners, with a character-as-a-service model: if a brand has built an experience lacking personality, Sixth Wall delivers a Hasbro character with the full golden record intact.

And, if an IP owner wants to bring their own characters into this world but lacks the infrastructure, Sixth Wall will onboard them.

Gray’s five-year vision is walking around theme parks, having real conversations with characters that know where they are and who they're talking to.

It’s less like a prediction, nor pipe dream, than a logical endpoint. Right now, interaction with IP is unilateral: a poster, a trailer, a campaign that audiences consume. What Sixth Wall is building toward is something bilateral, where the character knows you're there and is responding to you.

As such, Gray is convinced that in time, saying "I think Optimus Prime is alive" won't sound like hyperbole, it'll just feel true.

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