Larian Studios walks back generative AI use in Divinity after fan backlash, clarifies future AI role

After compounding backlash, Larian Studios, the developer behind Baldur’s Gate 3 and the upcoming title Divinity, has backed down on its stance regarding the use of generative AI in Divinity. Still, the studio maintains its stance that AI could ultimately help streamline other aspects of the development workflow to produce a high-quality experience.

The controversy kicked off a while ago when Larian revealed Divinity at The Game Awards 2025, following a cryptic tease. To celebrate the announcement, Swen Vincke, CEO of Larian, spoke with Bloomberg and said that the studio was dabbling in generative AI for concept art, presentations, and placeholder text. He did, however, stress that no AI-generated content would make it into the final release.

The backlash was fierce, and gamers online reacted negatively to Vincke’s comments. Vincke pushed back online and said:

Holy f**k, guys, we’re not pushing hard for or replacing concept artists with AI. We have a team of 72 artists, including 23 concept artists, and we are hiring more. The art they create is original, and I’m very proud of what they do.

To mitigate further backlash, Vincke participated in a Reddit AMA to answer gamers’ questions head-on. In the AMA, he took the first step and said:
 

So first off, there is not going to be any GenAI art in Divinity. I know there’s been a lot of discussion about our using AI tools for concept art exploration. We already said this doesn’t mean AI generates the actual concept art, but we understand it created confusion.

So, to ensure there is no room for doubt, we’ve decided to refrain from using GenAI tools during concept art development. That way, there can be no discussion about the origin of the art.

While Vincke said the studio is ditching GenAI to focus on concept art, he noted that Larian isn’t ditching AI entirely. He further explained:

Having said that, we continuously try to improve the speed with which we can try things out. The more iterations we can do, the better the gameplay is, in general. We think GenAI can help with this, so we’re testing it across departments. We hope it helps us refine ideas faster, leading to a more focused development cycle, less waste, and ultimately a higher-quality game.

The critical point to note is that we will not generate ‘creative assets’ for a game without being 100% sure of the origins of the training data and the consent of those who created it. If we use a GenAI model to create in-game assets, then it’ll be trained on data we own.

In the same AMA thread, writing director Adam Smith talked about Larian’s attempt at using GenAI for text generation and said that Larian “doesn’t have any text generation touching our dialogues, journal entries, or other writing in Divinity.” He said that a small test was conducted, yielding results of “3/10” at best.

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