Larian Studios — the Belgian developer behind 2023’s smash hit Baldur’s Gate 3 — has put a clear marker in the sand: its upcoming entry in the Divinity franchise will not contain AI-generated art. Studio head Swen Vincke made the clarification during a Reddit AMA, aiming to clear up confusion after a December Bloomberg interview in which he discussed plans to experiment with generative AI. “So first off—there is not going to be any GenAI art in Divinity,” Vincke wrote, and added that Larian will “refrain from using GenAI tools during concept art development” so “there can be no discussion about the origin of the art.” That stance is a direct response to growing player and artist pushback over how generative AI is used in game development. Since consumer-facing models like ChatGPT and Midjourney arrived in 2022, studios have wrestled with the trade-offs: faster prototyping and lower costs versus concerns about creative ownership, consent and job displacement. Larian says it will still experiment with AI in other parts of development to speed iteration — “the more iterations we can do, the better in general the gameplay is,” Vincke wrote — but it set firm limits for anything that would become in-game creative assets. “We will not generate ‘creative assets’ that end up in a game without being 100% sure about the origins of the training data and the consent of those who created the data,” he said. If the studio does use a generative model to produce assets, “it’ll be trained on data we own.” Larian’s machine learning lead, Gabriel Bosque, framed the studio’s approach as augmentation rather than replacement: “We believe machine learning is a powerful tool to accelerate and make game development more efficient and streamlined. This means that our creatives have more time doing the work that makes their jobs more rewarding and the game a richer experience.” The announcement lands amid an industry-wide reckoning: major publishers have faced criticism and made layoffs tied to automation and changing production pipelines. Whether Larian’s commitment — using AI for prototyping but not for final concept art, and insisting on provenance and consent — will satisfy worried creators and players remains to be seen. For context: Divinity began in 2002 and built Larian’s reputation on turn-based combat, branching narratives and co-op play. The most recent major entry, Divinity: Original Sin II (2017), was widely praised, and Larian’s later success with Baldur’s Gate 3 has only raised expectations for whatever comes next. Vincke did not offer a release window for the new Divinity title in the AMA. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news

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