The Belgian studio, which has recently been in the news due to Baldur’s Gate 3, has followed through on what it said toward the end of last year.

When Larian Studios announced Divinity at The Game Awards, the team likely didn’t expect the intense backlash that would follow – largely aimed at the studio and CEO Swen Vincke – after he made it clear that Larian had been experimenting with generative AI tools during development. In response, Vincke promised a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA), so players could ask questions and receive a clear, definitive answer on the topic. That AMA has now happened, and unsurprisingly, the first question focused on generative AI tools and their role in developing Divinity, as well as their place at Larian Studios more broadly.

“First off, there will not be any GenAI art in Divinity. I know there’s been a lot of discussion about us using AI tools for concept art. We’ve already said that this doesn’t mean the actual concept art is generated by AI, but we understand that it created confusion. To ensure there is no room for doubt, we have decided to refrain from using GenAI tools during concept art development. That way, there can be no discussion about the origin of the art.

That said, we are constantly trying to improve the speed at which we can try things out. The more iterations we can do, the better the gameplay generally is. We believe that GenAI can help with this, which is why we’re experimenting with it across departments. We hope it will help us refine ideas faster, resulting in a more focused development cycle, less waste, and ultimately, a higher-quality game. It’s important to note that we won’t generate “creative assets” for a game without first verifying the origins of the training data and ensuring the consent of those who created it. If we use a GenAI model to create in-game assets, it will be trained on data we own,” said Vincke.

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In response to a follow-up question, Larian Studios writing director Adam Smith confirmed that the studio’s stance on generative AI tools applies to writing as well – even if any generated text would only be used as temporary placeholder material:

“The stance applies to writing as well. No text generation touches our dialogues, journal entries, or other writing in Divinity. To answer your second question, ‘How does generated placeholder text benefit development over simple stub text?’ It doesn’t. We had a small group experimenting with text-generating tools, but the results were a 3/10 at best, and those tools are for research purposes only. Even my worst first drafts – and there are a lot of them – are at least a 4/10 (although Swen might disagree), and the amount of iteration required to bring individual lines up to our standards is enormous. From the initial stub to the line we record and ship, many eyes and hands are involved in perfecting a dialogue,” Smith said.

This isn’t the answer the studio’s harshest critics would want to hear, but it’s clear that Larian Studios has shifted its approach to generative AI use.

Source: WCCFTech