Larian Studios has abandoned the use of AI when creating concept art for the new Divinity
By ForGeeks
After a wave of criticism from players, Larian Studios, known for Baldur’s Gate 3 and the upcoming Divinity game, has reconsidered its stance on the use of generative AI in project development. The company has abandoned the use of such technology in concept art, but still believes that AI can be useful in other aspects of the production process.
The scandal erupted after Divinity was announced at The Game Awards 2025. At the time, Larian CEO Sven Vinke revealed in an interview with Bloomberg that the studio was experimenting with generative AI for concept sketches, presentations, and timed texts. However, he emphasized that no AI-generated content would make it into the final version of the game.
Despite these reservations, the community reaction has been extremely negative. Online users sharply criticized this approach, and Winke was forced to respond publicly, emphasizing that the studio is not going to replace artists with artificial intelligence. According to him, Larian has a team of 72 artists, including 23 concept artists, and the company continues to recruit new specialists. He also noted that he is proud of his team’s original work.
To lower the heat of discontent, Vinke took part in a Q&A session on Reddit. There, he bluntly stated that there will be no generative AI art in Divinity. He admitted that discussions about using AI to explore ideas in concept art had caused confusion, and to eliminate doubt altogether, the studio had decided to completely abandon GenAI tools during the concept art phase of development.
He admitted that the discussions about using AI to explore ideas in concept art had caused confusion.
Larian has no intention of completely abandoning AI technology, however. Vinke explained that the studio is constantly looking for ways to speed up the process of experimentation and iteration, as more trial and error usually leads to better gameplay. Generative AI can help refine ideas faster, make the development cycle more focused, reduce wasted time and resources, and ultimately improve the quality of the game, he said.
Generative AI can help the studio refine ideas faster, make the development cycle more focused, reduce wasted time and resources, and ultimately improve the quality of the game.
He also emphasized an important principle: The studio will not use generative AI to create creative game assets without full confidence in the provenance of the training data and the consent of its authors. If such models are ever used for in-game content, they will be trained exclusively on data owned by Larian itself.
He also emphasized an important principle: The studio will not use generative AI to create creative game asserts without assurance of the origin of the data.
In the same Reddit discussion, scripting director Adam Smith talked about experiments with generative AI for word processing. He noted that no AI tools are being used to create dialog, journal entries or other narrative elements in Divinity. He said a small test showed extremely poor results —no higher than «3 out of 10» which definitively confirmed the inappropriateness of using such solutions in the scripted portion of the game.
