Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian has changed its stance on generative AI following backlash faced at the end of last year.
In a Reddit Ask Me Anything hosted by the studio this afternoon, founder Swen Vincke said, “to ensure there is no room for doubt, we’ve decided to refrain from using gen-AI tools during concept art development”. “That way there can be no discussion about the origin of the art.”
It was the use of gen-AI in relation to concept art that people had been especially concerned about. Vincke, in an interview in December, which coincided with the studio’s Divinity game reveal, seemed to suggest Larian was using gen-AI to develop concept art. Controversy erupted, prompting Vincke to clarify that information had been “lost in translation”, and that the studio was only using gen-AI to explore references for concept art, not generate the images themselves.
Evidently, in the few weeks since, a decision has been made to remove all sources of ambiguity entirely. As if to reinforce this, Vincke’s Reddit post led with: “there is not going to be any gen-AI art in Divinity”. But the ambiguity hasn’t been entirely dispersed.
Vincke said Larian is still exploring gen-AI use in other applications at the studio. “We continuously try to improve the speed with which we can try things out,” he wrote. “The more iterations we can do, the better in general the gameplay is. We think gen-AI 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,” he added, “is that we will not generate ‘creative assets’ that end up in a game without being 100 percent sure about the origins of the training data and the consent of those who created the data. If we use a gen-AI model to create in-game assets, then it’ll be trained on data we own.”
Larian lead writer Adam Smith joined the thread to clarify that the ‘no gen-AI’ approach to art would also be true for writing in Divinity. “The stance applies to writing as well,” he wrote. “We don’t have any text generation touching our dialogues, journal entries or other writing in Divinity.”
Divinity was announced at The Game Awards 2025 with a dark and gory cinematic trailer showing a festival – centred around burning someone at the stake – going horribly, irrevocably wrong. It shares the same series name as Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2, of course, but it’s a completely new, detached game, and Larian is cooking up a new turn-based RPG system for it.