Larian backtracks on AI use for Divinity concept art and writing, but says generative AI ‘can help’ some areas of development

Divinity and Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian has said that it won’t use generative AI to create concept art or in the process of writing Divinity, but the developer is still interested in using the technology in other areas.

Following Larian‘s reveal of a new Divinity game at The Game Awards, CEO Swen Vincke confirmed to Bloomberg that the studio was using generative AI to explore early game ideas.

Vincke stated that Larian was using AI “to explore ideas, flesh out PowerPoint presentations, develop concept art and write placeholder text”, but said no AI-generated content would make it into the final game and that “everyone at the company is more or less OK with the way we’re using it”.

This wasn’t enough to satiate some users on social media, who argued that even using generative AI for the concept phase meant replacing human ideas.

Following this, Vincke responded online, writing,“Holy fuck guys we’re not ‘pushing hard’ for or replacing concept artists with AI.”

“We have a team of 72 artists, of which 23 are concept artists, and we are hiring more. The art they create is original,l and I’m very proud of what they do.

“I was asked explicitly about concept art and our use of Gen AI. I answered that we use it to explore things. I didn’t say we use it to develop concept art. The artists do that. And they are indeed world-class artists.”

Now the Larian boss has said, as part of a Reddit AMA, that generative AI won’t be used as part of concept art creation, so that there can be no doubt over the origin of any assets.

“So first off – there is not going to be any GenAI art in Divinity,” began Vincke.

“I know there’s been a lot of discussion about us using AI tools as part of concept art exploration. We already said this doesn’t mean the actual concept art is generated by AI, but we understand it created confusion.

“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.”

Vincke went on to explain that while GenAI won’t be used for concept art, the studio isn’t entirely abandoning the technology.

“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.

“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.”

Elsewhere in the AMA, writing director Adam Smith claimed that Larian doesn’t “have any text generation touching our dialogues, journal entries, or other writing in Divinity.”

Smith then said that while the studio had a limited group experimenting with the technology, the results were a “3/10 at best,” and that the tools are for research purposes.

The use of Generative AI in video games has become a contentious topic over the last year, with many consumers‎ and developers voicing concerns.

Steam games disclosing the use of generative AI had increased by 800% as of last summer, according to an analysis of generative AI games on Steam by Totally Human, which suggests that nearly 8,000 titles released on Steam now disclose GenAI usage, compared to 1,000 a year ago.