Larian boss responds to criticism of generative AI use: "it's something we are constantly discussing internally"

Other game developers join social media backlash

A few hours ago, reports surfaced that Larian are making use of generative AI during development of their new RPG Divinity - specifically, to come up with ideas, produce placeholder text, develop concept art, and create materials for PowerPoint presentations. In the same Bloomberg article, Larian CEO Swen Vincke sought to balance these revelations with the promise that Divinity won’t directly contain any AI-generated materials, commenting that "everything is human actors; we're writing everything ourselves."

As with generative AI in gamedev generally, the disclosure has sparked anger online - anger that is all the sharper for the love that has hitherto been directed at Larian, creators of amazing fantasy RPGs with sexy bears and demons. Inevitably, some of the outrage is from people who appear minimally familiar with game development, and in a few cases, haven’t read the report in full (unhelpfully, it’s behind Bloomberg’s paywall). Some of it, though, is from other game developers.

“Imagine your team makes a generationally renowned piece of entertainment and then immediately turning around and using fucking ChatGPT to make concept art in an IP you own,” writes Mitch Dyer, a writer for Star Wars: Battlefront 2 and Star Wars: Squadrons, adding that “’we're writing everything ourselves’ cannot square with ‘we use AI for placeholder text’”.

“If you're using it for Concept Art, you are replacing people,” observes Jeff Talbot, senior concept artist at Remnant 2 developers Gunfire Games. “If you are using it for Writing, you are replacing people. If you are using it at all in the development of the product, then its in the final product. Just dont use it.”

Among the devs responding is a former Larian staffer, environment artist Selena Tobin. "consider my feedback: i loved working at @larianstudios.com until AI," Tobin writes. "reconsider and change your direction, like, yesterday. show your employees some respect. they are world-class & do not need AI assistance to come up with amazing ideas."

The backlash continues to lash. Vincke has now sent our terrifying office acquaintance Ian Games a statement, expanding on the Bloomberg report and attempting to counter accusations that Larian intend to replace developers with generative AI software, or ship a game made up of AI-generated assets. Here’s that statement in its entirety:

We’ve been continuously increasing our pool of concept artists, writers and story-tellers, are actively putting together writer rooms, casting and recording performances from actors and hiring translators.
Since concept art is being called out explicitly - we have 23 concept artists and have job openings for more. These artists are creating concept art day in day out for ideation and production use.
Everything we do is incremental and aimed at having people spend more time creating.
Any ML tool used well is additive to a creative team or individual’s workflow, not a replacement for their skill or craft.
We are researching and understanding the cutting edge of ML as a toolset for creatives to use and see how it can make their day-to-day lives easier, which will let us make better games.
We are neither releasing a game with any AI components, nor are we looking at trimming down teams to replace them with AI.
While I understand it's a subject that invokes a lot of emotion, it's something we are constantly discussing internally through the lens of making everyone's working day better, not worse.

Generative AI continues to be a murky, messy pain in the arse to report on for a number of reasons. For one thing, there are a lot of different generative AI tools besides the Big Chatbots that are busily dragnetting all of internet culture, while creating a pretext for layoffs and contributing to an ever-larger share of global carbon emissions. Some videogame developers have created their own, proprietary and perhaps more responsibly operated technologies for internal use, such as the world generation software used by Plunkback.

There are also older kinds of automation or machine learning tool that tend to get bundled in with New ‘n’ Improved genAI, such as Embark’s technologies for robot animations in Arc Raiders. Vincke hasn't specified which kinds of genAI Larian are using - he himself equates machine learning with genAI in the statement above - but the Bloomberg report does mention PowerPoint, which has a lot of Microsoft Copilot gunk built in.

Anecdotally, we know that a lot of game developers are using genAI tools without saying so. Generative AI is also being used at different stages in development or production, and across various disciplines, creating confusion about what degree of negative reaction is appropriate, and what it means to say that a game “contains” AI-generated material. I myself am sympathetic to the argument that if you’ve used generative AI in any aspect of development, it “exists in” your game regardless of whether the art assets look like chunks of rehydrated Fortnite.

Anyway, I guess we will go back to Larian and ask for more comment. If you’d prefer to read about Divinity in itself – a turn-based CRPG sequel to Divinity: Original Sin 2 – here’s my own chat with Vincke. We did not discuss generative AI. Naturally, I am kicking myself about that. While I figured that Vincke might be more 'pragmatic' about the technology than many - he is, after all, a CEO, not a concept artist - it has genuinely never occurred to me that Larian might make use of such tools in any kind of deliberate, systematic way.