Featured Image Credit: Larian Studios
Topics: Baldur's Gate 3
Larian Studios, the developer behind Baldur’s Gate 3, has confirmed that it’ll no longer use Generative AI for ideation after coming under fire for admitting to do so late last year.
AI is a strange thing.
Half of the world, myself included, views it as the scourge of the earth.
There’s another half though unaware of its harms. A short conversation with ChatGPT can consume as much as 500ml of water with video or image generation requiring much more.
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AI is actively harming the environment and for what? A terrible video of a cat playing a trombone?
It’s for reasons like this that it’s so wildly unpopular with some, hence why Larian was heavily criticised for its admitted use of AI last month.
The studio was clear that no AI content was present within Baldur’s Gate 3. However, Larian’s Swen Vincke told Bloomberg that developers “often use AI tools to explore ideas, flesh out PowerPoint presentations, develop concept art and write placeholder text”.
This resulted in a major uproar, with some fans worried that in the future, AI placeholders might slip through into the final product. Others mourned the loss of pure human creativity.
Well, following the backlash, Larian recently held an ‘Ask Me Anything’ on Reddit, during which they confirmed that the studio had scrapped all use of Generative AI.
“First off—there is not going to be any gen AI art in Divinity," Vincke confirmed.
"I know there’s been a lot of discussion about us using AI tools as part of concept art exploration. We already said this doesn’t mean the actual concept art is generated by AI but we understand it created confusion.
"So, to ensure there is no room for doubt, we’ve decided to refrain from using gen AI tools during concept art development."
Larian writing director Adam Smith later went on to clarify that this stance applied to writing too.
“We don't have any text generation touching our dialogues, journal entries or other writing in Divinity,” Smith said of Larian’s next project, revealed at The Game Awards.
Responding to a user, he added, “To answer your second question, 'How does generated placeholder text benefit development over simple stub text?’, it doesn't. We had a limited group experimenting with tools to generate text, but the results hit a 3/10 at best and those tools are for research purposes, not for use in Divinity.
“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 get even individual lines to the quality we want is enormous.
“From the initial stub to the line we record and ship, there are a great many eyes and hands involved in getting a dialogue right.”
It’s great to get some clarity on this because Divinity’s reveal was easily one of the highlights of The Game Awards, so it was a great shame that this AI debate overshadowed it in the subsequent days.
Let’s hope we can get back on track with the game’s hype train, although Divinity isn’t expected to land for a few years.