While Larian Studios certainly had one of the most interesting trailers during The Game Awards 2025 where it revealed that its next big release will be a new Divinity game, the studio has since fallen in some hot water owing to founder and game director Swen Vincke’s recent interview with Bloomberg. In the interview, Vincke spoke about the studio’s push to use generative AI despite these tools not offering much in the way of efficiency gains. According to Bloomberg, Larian is using generative AI to “explore ideas, flesh out PowerPoint presentations, develop concept art and write placeholder text.”
This interview has since caused quite a stir among fans of the studio’s other recent works like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2. While some noted that using generative AI tools for things like PowerPoint presentations might be fine, the fact that these tools are also being used to create concept art for the game acts as a bit of a red flag. As Reddit user Gnl_Winter notes, it “poses an ethical copyright issue, and it also hampers creativity, which is a serendipitous process in which the ideas developed as concept art are essential.”
This criticism has prompted Vincke to issue a statement as a follow-up to IGN, where he spoke about how machine learning tools provided to creative teams are working as “additive” to their own talents rather than being serving as replacements. He also noted that Larian currently has 23 concept artists, along with job openings to hire even more. Thanks to this, new concept art is being created on a daily basis for use in ideation as well as production. Check out the full statement below.
“We’ve been continuously increasing our pool of concept artists, writers and story-tellers, are actively putting together writer rooms, casting and recording performances from actors and hiring translators.. Since concept art is being called out explicitly – we have 23 concept artists and have job openings for more. These artists are creating concept art day in day out for ideation and production use.”
“Everything we do is incremental and aimed at having people spend more time creating. Any ML tool used well is additive to a creative team or individual’s workflow, not a replacement for their skill or craft. We are researching and understanding the cutting edge of ML as a toolset for creatives to use and see how it can make their day-to-day lives easier, which will let us make better games.”
“We are neither releasing a game with any AI components, nor are we looking at trimming down teams to replace them with AI. While I understand it’s a subject that invokes a lot of emotion, it’s something we are constantly discussing internally through the lens of making everyone’s working day better, not worse.”
Vincke also took to social media to issue yet another statement, where he said that Larian is not replacing its concept artists with generative AI tools. He also spoke about having a team of 72 artists in total, and how everything the team is creating is completely original. His statements about the use of generative AI, he noted, came from him simply being asked about the subject during the interview. Expanding further on the use of AI, he said that the tools were used to explore references in a way similar to how books and even Google are often used.
