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 think my, and maybe others, main issues are:
If the training data is the same as the popular image gen ones, then regardless of how it’s used I don’t support it. If a company is charging for/building a brand on AI tools the artists whose work trained the tools need to be compensated. If they are working with or paying for any of these models I think it supports a business that is stealing from artists.
If you don’t know what the training data is, there’s no way to know for sure it’s not replicating someone else’s work in whole or in part in a way that an artist would not. Artists know how to take inspiration and pay homage without stealing, but if they don’t actually know the original work that the AI is basing things off of, there’s no way to ensure that.
To me it sounds like they’re using generative AI images for inspiration boards, which typically is made from other people’s art. If this is the case, then there’s no more risk of stealing art on accident than usual (I hope they have better practices than Bungie).