Baldur’s Gate 3 Director Reverses Course on AI Art for Divinity, Opting Out of GenAI Tools in Concept Development

Swen Vincke, the director of Baldur’s Gate 3 and Divinity, has announced that his studio will no longer incorporate generative AI in any part of their concept art creation process.

During a recent AMA, Vincke stated, “there is not going to be any GenAI art in Divinity.” The studio had previously clarified that no concept art was produced using generative AI technology, but now they have confirmed, “we’ve decided to refrain from using genAI tools during concept art development. This way, there can be no debate about the origin of the art.”

Vincke mentioned that the studio will keep evaluating the technology to “continuously try to improve the speed with which we can try things out.” He believes that “the more iterations we can do, the better the gameplay becomes. We think GenAI can help with this.”

The key point he emphasized 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.”

Following the reveal of Divinity last month, the news that Larian had utilized generative AI in some of its concept work sparked considerable backlash, which is part of the reason for today’s AMA.

As discussions around Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s AI usage resurface amid criticism of Larian, the Divinity lead reassured fans that “we have good QA and leads” to address concerns about the RPG potentially shipping with AI-generated assets.