‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Game Studio Says ‘Divinity’ Won’t Feature AI-Generated Art

Larian Studios, the developer behind the 2023 award-winning role-playing game Baldur’s Gate 3, said on Friday that its upcoming game Divinity will not feature AI-generated art, although the studio is not completely ruling out the possibility of using AI-powered tools.

Studio head Swen Vincke addressed the issue in a response to Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA). The clarification follows growing criticism from players and artists over the way generative AI is used in game development.

“So first off: there will be no GenAI art in Divinity,” Vincke wrote. “I know there has been a lot of discussion about using AI tools as part of concept art exploration. We have already said that this does not mean that the actual concept art is generated by AI, but we understand that this has caused some confusion.”

The confusion that Vincke wanted to address arose from an interview in December with Bloombergwhere the studio head talked about how Larian plans to use generative AI technology. Vinke’s comments today were intended to clear up that confusion.

“To ensure there is no room for doubt, we have decided not to use GenAI tools during concept art development,” he wrote. “This way there can be no discussion about the origin of the art.”

Since the public launch of ChatGPT and Midjourney in 2022, which brought prompt text and image generation to a broad audience, the gaming industry has been grappling with how to use generative AI – or use it at all.

Players, developers and artists have expressed concerns about its impact on creative work, even as studios face rising development costs and growing player expectations.

Revealed in December, Divinity looks to continue the studio’s focus on large-scale role-playing adventures. While Vincke didn’t say when the next game in the Divinity saga would be released, he said Larian would continue to test AI tools in other parts of development.

“We’re constantly trying to improve the speed at which we can try things out,” he wrote. “The more iterations we can do, the better the gameplay is overall.”

Vincke said any AI-generated content in a game would be subject to data ownership and consent restrictions.

“The important thing to note is that we will not generate ‘creative assets’ that end up in a game without being 100% sure of the origins of the training data and the consent of those who created the data,” he wrote. “When we use a GenAI model to create in-game assets, it is trained on the data we own.”

Launched in 2002, Divinity is a series of fantasy role-playing games known for their turn-based combat, story choice, and cooperative multiplayer. The series helped establish the studio before its success with Baldur’s Gate 3. The previous entry, 2017’s Divinity: Original Sin II, received rave reviews from critics.

Whether players will be happy with the commitment to using generative AI just for prototyping remains to be seen, as major game publishers including Square Enix and Microsoft have cut jobs in favor of automation.

Larian Machine Learning leader Gabriel Bosque responded to concerns about the use of AI in game development, saying the studio sees machine learning technology as a tool to support, not supplant, its creative teams or voice actors.

“This is all new technology, so I completely understand why it’s hard to see where the positive applications lie,” he wrote. “We believe machine learning is a powerful tool to accelerate game development and make it more efficient and streamlined. This means our creatives have more time to do the work that makes their work more rewarding and the game a richer experience.”