From awe-inspiring shock to incredible backlash for its use of generative AI for creating concept art, Larian Studios’ Divinity has had quite the ride. Despite founder and CEO Swen Vincke pushing back against the criticism, ensuring that GenAI content would not be in the final game, he’s since relented on its use for concept art. At least for Divinity‘s development.
“So first off – there is not going to be any GenAI art in Divinity,” Vincke said in a Reddit AMA. “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 genAI tools during concept art development. That way, there can be no discussion about the origin of the art.”
The company will still try to continuously “improve the speed with which we can try things out. The more iterations we can do, the better, in general, the gameplay is.
“We think GenAI can help with this, and so we’re trying things out across departments. Our hope is that it can aid us to refine ideas faster, leading to a more focused development cycle, less waste, and ultimately, a higher-quality game.
“The important bit to note is that 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. If we use a GenAI model to create in-game assets, then it’ll be trained on data we own.”
While certainly a “we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it” dilemma – Larian isn’t swearing off AI completely, after all – this should at least assuage concerns about Divinity’s development. But what about the writing? Writer Adam Smith weighed in, confirming that abstaining from GenAI “applies to writing as well. We don’t have any text generation touching our dialogues, journal entries or other writing in Divinity.”
Responding to a query about how AI-generated placeholder text would be better than stub text, Smith said that it’s not. “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.”
Divinity doesn’t have a release date or platforms, but Larian Studios is aiming for a quicker turnaround time than Baldur’s Gate 3. Early access is potentially on the cards once more, though plans have yet to be confirmed (and it’s unlikely to become available in 2026), and combat once again embraces a turn-based approach.
Despite the dense lore surrounding the series, the developer has ensured that new players can jump into Divinity without prior knowledge. As for the shocking reveal trailer, Larian’s Michael Douse said it was more about “treating the audience with a level of intellectual respect.”
