Larian Studios will ‘refrain from using Gen AI’ in concept art but won’t give up on the tech entirely

As announced, Larian Studios is hosting an AMA, following a massive controversy over generative AI in its upcoming game, Divinity. The studio’s devs, including chief executive Swen Vincke, answered all sorts of questions, including those related to this controversial technology.

In the AMA, held on Jan. 9 on the r/games subreddit, a user asked the studio about its use of generative AI. “What is your opinion on the role of (generative) AI in the game development process, and for your studio in particular,” they asked, additionally inquiring if the AI is being used in some departments and not in others.

Vincke first said that “there is not going to be any generative AI art in Divinity,” saying that a lot of confusion had been caused in the past over how the tech is used, which led the studio to completely “refrain from using generative AI tools during concept art development.” This last caused the greatest amount of controversy in December, with players strongly opposed to AI in art in any capacity.

“That way there can be no discussion about the origin of the art,” Vincke added.

However, Larian Studios will not give up on generative AI entirely, as Vincke believes it can “help” with speed, allowing for way more iterations and testing that further leads to better and, apparently, more refined gameplay. “We’re trying things out across departments,” he said.

“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,” Vincke added.

Vincke concluded that creative assets could still be generated by AI, but only by AI trained on data created by Larian itself and fed into its seemingly self-hosted model.

“If we use a GenAI model to create in-game assets, then it’ll be trained on data we own,” he said, which does confirm AI will be used in art, but only to iterate on what Larian had already created itself, rather than what Call of Duty recently did with Ghibli-filter AI all over the place.

In the same thread, Divinity‘s writing director, Adam Smith, also noted that no AI is being used in writing whatsoever. While the studio did apparently try to make the technology work for dialogues and other text, it failed to provide satisfactory results, with even the most random human writing ending up being better, so that department seems to be completely AI-free.

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