Earlier today Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier published an interview with Swen Vincke, the CEO of Larian, the company behind the internet’s favourite video game and demonic relationship simulator Baldur’s Gate 3. It could not have gone worse for the guy.
Among all the expected pre-release interview talk about how their next game, Divinity, will be making all kinds of improvements over their last game […]
Saying you only use AI for “reference” is wild. Artists use image searches and books as inspiration because they are drawing on art (but also everything else from colour palettes to photos to the weather). There’s experience there, things they can relate to, be inspired by. There is no inspiration in slop! Everything AI is presenting to you is simply stolen and amalgamated. It’s like asking your phone’s autocorrect for relationship advice.
There’s an unsurprising tendency across leaders in the tech world (games included) to see art as merely part of something’s production line, a box that needs to be ticked before copies can be sold. It’s why AI is often justified as something that saves time, or saves money. But with art, that process is the point. The themes and ideas artists draw on, the way they iterate through those ideas with sketches, the work itself is what creates art. There are no shortcuts.
I used gen ai for some concept stuff, not as a finished product, but as a muse. I haven’t touched it since the first generation of image gen, so to say what it made for me was nowhere near what I had in mind is a dramatic understatement (boy did it suck with fins!). But it pointed me in the direction I wanted and gave me some additional ideas for what to use for my own work, as well as posture models (I don’t really have art skills as such; that trait largely skipped me in my wildly artistic family, but I’m trying to develop it somewhat cuz I have IDEAS). It helped fuel my idea spark into a creative bonfire.
If I showed you the finished piece (which isn’t done by a long shot, and probably won’t be as good as I imagine it), then the muse concept stuff, you’d be hard pressed to find any real resemblance, other than certain major elements being present, but those elements were what I was asking it to generate in the first place.
I assume that is basically what their art department is doing as well. And for that, it’s actually pretty useful, specifically because it pulls details from many different works, and blends them in potentially novel ways.