Larian and Bloomberg clarify statements on AI usage in Divinity development

Following the release of an interview between Larian CEO Swen Vincke and Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, there’s been a hefty stink caused by the mention of Larian using generative AI as a tool for the development of Divinity. This has led to Vincke and Schreier to both issue statements and provide greater context, downplaying even further the extent to which generative AI is being used.

The main sticking point was the use of gen-AI to produce concept art, but Vincke has now stressed that Larian has a significant pool of concept artists, job openings for more, and that gen-AI isn’t producing concept art itself, but could create reference material that artists would previously have looked for photographic reference material for inspiration. Aside from that, from the broader Bloomberg interview transcript, it’s placeholder text and white box assets, internal powerpoint presentations, Vincke himself using it to brush up his own emails (given that English is a second language).

The problem really stemmed from the brevity and some framing of Bloomberg’s original section about generative AI:

Under Vincke, Larian has been pushing hard on generative AI, although the CEO says the technology hasn’t led to big gains in efficiency. He says there won’t be any AI-generated content inDivinity — “everything is human actors; we’re writing everything ourselves” — but the creators often use AI tools to explore ideas, flesh out PowerPoint presentations, develop concept art and write placeholder text.

The use of generative AI has led to some pushback at Larian, “but I think at this point everyone at the company is more or less OK with the way we’re using it,” Vincke said.

Note the use of “pushing hard” and that there has been pushback in the studio.

On social media, Vincke has now responded to the concerns that artists were being replaced:

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 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.

We use AI tools to explore references, just like we use google and art books. At the very early ideation stages we use it as a rough outline for composition which we replace with original concept art. There is no comparison.

I talked about how we use ML here if you would like to know more: Gamespot

We’ve hired creatives for their talent, not for their ability to do what a machine suggests, but they can experiment with these tools to make their lives easier.

In the Gamespot article, he describes the AI use as often being for work and jobs that “nobody wants to do”.

And to circle back to Bloomberg, on social media, Schreier (who somehow didn’t expect that AI use would be controversial) said, “If I had known the two paragraphs about genAI in my article today would be so controversial, I would have expanded them a bit! Here’s a rough transcript of the relevant portion of my interview with Swen Vincke, so everyone has all the context.

“I am not sharing this transcript because I think it will make anyone view Larian’s stance on genAI any differently; I’m sharing it so people can see all the context and judge for themselves if they feel that Larian’s position was misrepresented by my story.”

Here’s the rough transcript:

JS: Speaking of efficiency, you’ve spoken a little bit about generative AI. And I know that that’s been a point of discussion on the team, too. Do you feel like it can speed up production?

SV: In terms of generation, like white boxing, yes, there’s things, but I’m not 100% sure if you’re actually seeing speed-ups that much. You’re trying more stuff. Having tried stuff out, I don’t actually think it accelerates things. Because there’s a lot of hype out there. I haven’t really seen: oh this is really gonna replace things. I haven’t seen that yet. I’ve seen a lot of where you initially get excited, oh, this could be cool. And then you say, ah, you know, in the end it doesn’t really do the thing. Everything is human actors; we are writing everything ourselves. There’s no generated assets that you’re gonna see in the game. We are trying to use generated assets to accelerate white-boxing. But I mean to be fair, we’re talking about basic things to help the level designers.

JS: What about concept art?

SV: So that’s being used by concept artists. They use it the same like they would use photos. We have like 30 concept artists at this point or something like that. So we bought a boutique concept art firm at the moment that everybody was using reducing them because they were going to AI, in our case it just went up. If there’s one thing that artists keep on asking for it’s more concept artists. But what they do is they use it for exploration.

JS: The other thing that I’ve seen that being used for more and more is placeholders, stub dialogue.

SV: Well, yes. So it depends on the scripter. In our case what we do is whiteboxing means that the scripts put stub text in there. Some scripters will probably use a chatGPT, some will write it themselves. It’s really up to them–

JS: But you found that it’s not actually speeding things up. It’s just kind of allowing more experimentation.

SV: Well, in the sense that speeds it up because your experimentation is broader. But I mean, it’s not as if their dialogues are suddenly being written faster. And on the contrary, and it’s not as if you’re seeing the scripting going faster. What’s happening is there’s just more stuff being done, but I mean if you’ve used chatGPT, it helps you organize things, gets you a faster-

JS: Until it screws up and–

SV: Right. You still will always have to alter it yourself. And I mean like I’m non-native English, so it’s easier for me to make my phrases without mistakes. So it helps with that.

JS: To write your company emails.

SV: No, no, no, no. I mean I like putting it in there to see okay, this is a clean version of my text. So what’s happening is I write with worse grammar now and then I use it to clean up my text and then I have to go over it again to clean it up again.

JS: That seems like it would take more time.

SV: Yes, I know. But I have the feeling like my phrases are better.

JS: Your English is pretty good. You don’t have to worry that much.

SV: I think experimentation, white boxing, some broader white boxing, lots and lots of applications and retargeting and cleaning and editing. These are things that just really take a lot of time. So that allows you to do more. So there’s a lot of value there in terms of the creative process itself. It helps in doing things. But I haven’t seen the acceleration. So I’m really curious to see because there’s all studios that said, of this is gonna accelerate… If you look at the state of the art of video games today, these are still in their infancy. Will they eventually manage to do that at large scale? I don’t know how much data centers they’re gonna need to be able to do it.

JS: It doesn’t seem like it’s causing more efficiency, so why use it?

SV: This is a tech driven industry, so you try stuff. You can’t afford not to try things because if somebody finds the golden egg and you’re not using it, you’re dead this industry.

JS: OK, but the downside though is that it’s so poisonous, controversial to players, to artists, to creative people in a way that other tech isn’t. Maybe Photoshop used to be back in the day?

SV: I think you would find the same argument back in the days for a lot of things, right? Anything that was has been automated has always considered – I think the part of this job is to make sure that you are competitive and state of the art. So if you don’t look at the state of the art, you will eventually regret it. That’s gonna be even worse for developers.

So what do you think? Is Vincke too casual about the impact of generative AI? Is that offset by the way that it’s being used internally and that it’s supporting a company that continues to grow? There’s definitely a lot of nuance here.

Source: Bloomberg, Swen Vincke, Jason Schreier