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.
What does he think concept art is for?
Feels like people are assuming they’re generating images and calling it concept art but there are so many ways an artist could use it in the process of making concept art. A process that starts with pumping out as many minimal-effort concepts as possible… Do you really want to colorize 20 sketches that will likely get scrapped or would you rather stick it in a homebrewed ComfyUI workflow and have a slightly worse version done in 30 seconds?
I know this is the fuck ai community and I do agree with the sentiment but hating on “AI” as a vague idea is a bit ignorant. There are legitimate uses for it, they’re just overshadowed by the awful ones getting pushed to us by corporations.