Today, Larian Studios, makers of the Divinity series and the universally acclaimed Baldur's Gate 3, found itself in the crosshairs of the Internet's ire due to comments made by its CEO, Swen Vincke during an interview with Bloomberg.

According to Vincke, Larian has been using generative AI behind the scenes to, in his words, "explore ideas, flesh out PowerPoint presentations, develop concept art and write placeholder text". None of which are things you need generative AI for, and all of which are things that people have been perfectly capable of doing with their own human brains for decades. In fact, there are people who specialise in elements of what he described — most notably concept art, which is the area a lot of critics have been focusing on.

Vincke's comments are remarkably ill-considered given the number of times that generative AI use in video games has been subject to backlash from the general public and journalists alike over the course of just the last year — and for many of the same reasons that Vincke is arguing in favour of.

The otherwise well-regarded sci-fi game The Alters was irreversibly poisoned for a lot of people earlier this year when it became apparent that they had used ChatGPT to generate placeholder text for background textures and localised strings for non-English languages.

The umpteenth reboot of Everybody's Golf came under fire for non-specific use of generative AI that I'm not sure anyone ever quite got to the bottom of.

The new Let It Die game, which has no involvement from the previous game's original developers Suda51 or Grasshopper Manufacture, has been lambasted for extensive use of AI-generated material.

The promising "people sim that isn't called The Sims" inZOI turned huge swathes of prospective players away by its game's heavy reliance on generative AI, as well as its publisher Krafton's insistence that they are pivoting to becoming an "AI-first" company.

The latest hot "extraction shooter" (I still don't really know what that is, and no, I don't really care) ARC Raiders got dinged with a 2/5 review score for its use of AI-generated voices — not just because they were AI, but because using AI-generated voices is at artistic odds with the story the game is trying to tell.

Even the once-beloved Oliver Twins, former stars of the UK "bedroom programming" scene in the '80s, got a kicking from press and public alike for their absolutely terrible AI-generated "follow-up" (and I use the term loosely) to their old Spectrum game, Ghost Hunters.

People hate this shit — and with good reason. Generative AI is a lazy, soulless solution for feckless CEOs to foist on their creative teams because they think it will "add value" for shareholders, when in fact there is growing evidence by the day that the entire generative AI scene is financially, environmentally and societally ruinous.

On top of all that, it doesn't work well enough to be worth using! Every single AI "tool" currently available carries a prominent disclaimer that it "might" (read: "will") get things wrong from time to time, making them fundamentally useless for doing anything useful with — and their "fun" uses are causing the Internet to become overrun with even more meaningless, pointless slop than was already splattered everywhere in the first place, on top of boiling all our lakes. At least stupid things from a bygone age like Badger Badger Badger and Seepage (to name just two examples from what I believe to be the golden age of Internet nonsense) are the result of both genuine human creativity and skilful use of creative tools that don't involve typing "make me funny video garfield giant boobs mechahitler piss filter" into a chatbot.

Vincke's point was not that the new Divinity game will be riddled with AI-generated voice lines or visuals. In fact, he claims that the studio is "neither releasing a game with any AI components, nor are [they] looking at trimming down teams to replace them with AI", but that AI is "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".

Vincke has, apparently, been receiving some pushback from within Larian about this — and he's certainly been getting some choice words from former employees today, too. The situation escalated to such a degree that he issued a statement in response to IGN earlier today. Unfortunately, said statement doesn't really say anything — and, worse, attempts to obfuscate his earlier statements by pointedly using the term "ML" (for "Machine Learning") rather than his earlier use of "AI" — today typically interpreted to mean "generative AI" when used in contexts such as this.

For me, the worst thing was his final paragraph:

While I understand [generative AI] is 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.

Here's the thing. You see that people are getting sniffy about generative AI, something which is well-established by this point to be A Thing The Public Fucking Hates. The sensible thing to do from a public relations perspective at this point, regardless of what you actually think, is to go "okay, you know what, we hear you, this sucks" or something along those lines, and then promise to "do better" or the like. A bunch of people won't believe you, of course, but this is better than going "no, well, I actually do think everyone at Larian should use this, and by 'discussing internally' I probably actually mean mandating that all employees have to use it at least a certain amount", which is how this is all coming across right now.

The particularly dumbass thing about this episode is, as I said above, none of the examples he gave are situations that need generative AI — or even where it is particularly beneficial. In fact, several creative types have commented today on how using "good enough", plausible-looking placeholders is actually detrimental to the entire creative process. Former Rocksteady employee Amy-Leigh Shaw commented thus on Bluesky earlier:

Placeholder text isn't supposed to be unique per line. It is supposed to be an instruction to the writer with a great big warning sign slapped on the top, so that it doesn't slip into the finished game. Unique sentences of bland writing are the least helpful thing to use for that purpose!

I also find that one of the more frustrating blockers to writing is when there's already a (bad) suggestion of what you should say. You are no longer able to organically find the idea because the suggestion in front of you knocks you off the track of your natural thought process.

Shaw is talking specifically about writing here, but several artists agreed that this is the case when dealing with concept art, too. The difference between a hastily scrawled Microsoft Paint doodle and the "this sort of looks right" thing that generative AI spits out is enormous — and in the latter case, it will absolutely colour an artist's interpretation of a scene or character, often unconsciously.

In other words, there's no defence of using generative AI as "placeholders" for text, concept art, voice acting, music — anything that a creative person is actually going to get involved with. The entire point of a placeholder is that it's something obviously shit and out of place so it can be easily spotted and subsequently replaced by a specialist at some point in the development process. Because generative AI produces something that is often "good enough" to the untrained eye or someone not looking closely, it's easy for it to get missed — as happened with The Alters earlier in the year.

Vincke's comments — and his subsequent follow-up statement — have torched a significant amount of goodwill that people had for Larian Studios in the space of just a single day. People fucking loved Baldur's Gate 3 and the previous Divinity: Original Sin games! It feels like it shouldn't have been a difficult job to maintain that goodwill while hyping up your new game — even if some found themselves a tad squicked out by a rather grim trailer at The Game Awards. But no. C-suite gonna C-suite, I guess — and it appears that this is true for companies people had, up until now, actually liked, as much as it is for companies people love to hate. And the net result of this for Larian is that people who were previously excited about a new Divinity game are now not going to touch it.

I know this has certainly given me a great degree of pause on wanting to check out any of Larian's work. I've been meaning to look at the Divinity: Original Sin games and Baldur's Gate 3 for a while — but now I'm in even less of a hurry to do so than I was already.

I'm so very tired of this. I, like many others, cannot wait for this fucking bubble to pop so we can get back to something approaching "normality", whatever that even means any more.

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