Baldur’s Gate 3 and Divinity developer Larian Studios held its Reddit AMA (ask me anything) today, after backlash from the studio reportedly using generative AI in the development of its new game. During the lengthy AMA the studio seemingly drew a line in the sand, committing to not using generative AI as part of the concept art process, as well as any of the writing processes for the game.
Larian CEO and co-founder Swen Vincke noted that no current concept art had been created using AI, but that he saw how his comments had been misconstrued. The controversy first started when Vincke did an interview with Bloomberg, where he talked about the studio’s experimentation with AI — seemingly implying it was part of the concept art process.
In the Reddit AMA, Vincke said that it was removing generative AI from the entire concept art process to ensure that players knew all art is original.
“There is not going to be any generative AI art in Divinity,” Vincke writes in the AMA.
“So, to ensure there is no room for doubt, we’ve decided to refrain from using genAI tools during concept art development. That way there can be no discussion about the origin of the art.”
Later in the AMA, Larian writing director Adam Smith says the studio doesn’t “have any text generation touching our dialogues, journal entries, or other writing in Divinity.” Smith does say the team experimented with genAI, but the results were “3/10 at best” and paled even in comparison to his worst human drafts.
However, all this doesn’t mean that Larian has written off genAI entirely.
“Having said that, we continuously try to improve the speed with which we can try things out. The more iterations we can do, the better in general the gameplay is,” Vincke says, “We think GenAI can help with this and so we’re trying things out across departments. Our hope is that it can aid us to refine ideas faster, leading to a more focused development cycle, less waste, and ultimately, a higher quality game.”
“The important bit to note is that we will not generate ‘creative assets’ that end up in a game without being 100% sure about the origins of the training data and the consent of those who created the data. If we use a GenAI model to create in-game assets, then it’ll be trained on data we own.”
The AMA is ongoing, so check the full thread for more details.
Divinity is currently in development, and does not have a release date. The studio also recently announced that Baldur’s Gate 3 has sold over 20 million copies to date.
