Earlier today Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier published an interview with Swen Vincke, the CEO of Larian, the company behind the internet’s favourite video game and demonic relationship simulator Baldur’s Gate 3. It could not have gone worse for the guy.
Among all the expected pre-release interview talk about how their next game, Divinity, will be making all kinds of improvements over their last game […]
Saying you only use AI for “reference” is wild. Artists use image searches and books as inspiration because they are drawing on art (but also everything else from colour palettes to photos to the weather). There’s experience there, things they can relate to, be inspired by. There is no inspiration in slop! Everything AI is presenting to you is simply stolen and amalgamated. It’s like asking your phone’s autocorrect for relationship advice.
There’s an unsurprising tendency across leaders in the tech world (games included) to see art as merely part of something’s production line, a box that needs to be ticked before copies can be sold. It’s why AI is often justified as something that saves time, or saves money. But with art, that process is the point. The themes and ideas artists draw on, the way they iterate through those ideas with sketches, the work itself is what creates art. There are no shortcuts.
I’m as big of an AI hater as anyone, but if you’re going to use it, this is pretty much the way you do so.
None of the results end up in the final product, concept art is notoriously different from final results in almost all projects, and having a concept artist spit out 30 basic AI concepts in a day and then pick 2 or 3 of them to manually iterate further on is, actually, streamlining their work flow without major upset and without completely replacing the artist in question.
Would I rather they aren’t using Gen-AI at all? Yeah, absolutely, I think it is one of the great evils of the modern world. But if you do insist on using it within the creative process, this is one of the least upsetting and most sensible ways I can think of doing so. I don’t see this as problematic beyond the fact that Larian is supporting AI companies by doing so.
My interpretation of what he said is that the concept artists are using AI concepts to fill out their mood board.