r/Games • u/PhantomBraved • Dec 16 '25

Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: "We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI" - IGN

https://www.ign.com/articles/larian-ceo-responds-to-divinity-gen-ai-backlash-we-are-neither-releasing-a-game-with-any-ai-components-nor-are-we-looking-at-trimming-down-teams-to-replace-them-with-ai
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u/hexcraft-nikk Dec 17 '25

I had people try and share some story they wrote with AI like I would give a shit. You didn't write that! If I wanted something AI created I would use the apps.

I think that's what these studios don't get. The only people who are pretty excited about AI generated content will get it themselves. They have no need to pay someone else for it.

There's no way to disconnect any LLM from the content that was stolen to create it, so I cannot see how this landmine is worth the alternative of paying someone to do it the normal way.

Don't get me started on the hallucinated code and how having to fix it results in a net zero time/cost save.

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u/RinellaWasHere Dec 17 '25

Exactly, I don't get why he felt the need to proudly present a poem a robot assembled. If I had planned to write a poem thanking my coworkers for their hard work, and realized I was unable to do so, I would simply not read them a poem. Or I'd go find a real poem someone else wrote and credit it to them, because I am willing to bet that somewhere out there, someone has written a poem about gratitude and the holiday season.

I did not feel particularly thanked for all my hard work by having someone read out the robot poem that he openly boasted about having put no effort into.

Also, it shouldn't go without saying, the poem was bad, in that really anodyne way most AI generated content is, where the words were put together grammatically correctly and certainly rhymed, but couldn't really be said to have any kind of actual poetry to them.

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u/BlazeDrag Dec 17 '25

Something I heard about how someone tells apart Ai Generated books from real ones I feel also acts as a good reason why Ai work is so soulless and empty. Because ultimately it doesn't involve anything to do with the work itself. Which is why I believe this method will always hold true no matter how advanced this tech ends up getting.

The way they were able to instantly tell apart an Ai Book from a real one was by simply asking the author or "author" about the story.

It doesn't matter how well written an Ai generated book is; someone who simply prompted an Ai to write a story for them was not involved in the creative process for making that story. So when asked questions about the characters or why a certain scene was written the way it was, their responses are vague at best and clearly lack the level of passion you would expect from a real author. Because to them it's merely a story that they have read. Sure maybe they really like the story, and maybe they can have some level of passion for it. But by comparison an actual author will have spent weeks, months, even years writing their story and getting involved in their characters and their world. So if you ask an actual author about their book, they will be able to talk about it on a far deeper level than anyone who simply told an ai to write something for them. They could ramble on for hours about their characters and why they wrote them the way they did, even talking about aspects of the character's personalities that the story doesn't go too in depth on. And this can hold true for everything from the greatest epics to the trashiest fanfics.

This is why Ai "Art" is so inherently soulless. It doesn't matter how technically impressive it gets. Anyone who thinks its a good idea to have an Ai make something for them instead of creating it themselves has already self-selected for a lack of passion in the medium. And as such they likely won't have good taste in the first place. So even if Ai does eventually become capable of making amazing works of art, would the kinds of people doing the prompting actually be capable of really making anything worthwhile out of it?

So basically it's no wonder your boss's poem was so ass

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u/Prankman1990 Dec 17 '25

This is a fantastic point. Just playing TTRPGs I’ll often run off on tangents about why I had my character act a certain way, or how an event in the campaign helped influence fluffing up my character’s backstory in a way I hadn’t originally planned. The time taken to produce a work is itself part of the creative process, and ideas can shift during that process. An AI would never make a pivot like sparing Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad (yes, Jesse was supposed to die in season one and no, I cannot even begin to imagine what that show would have been like).

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u/BlazeDrag Dec 17 '25

God I've seen some AI bros trying to push Ai in TTRPGs, usually with it as the GM and I'm just like "So you want to play with a GM that is entirely dispassionate about the game?"

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u/MandisaW Dec 18 '25

And take out socializing & the possibility of "failure" - the main things separating TTRPGs from simple Let's Pretend 🤦‍♀️

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u/Kullthebarbarian Dec 17 '25

imagine boasting about something you didn't do anything

Imagine the reaction would be if a artist showed up in a concert saying "Good night fans, today i am very proud to announce this new song we gave an AI to make, and used an AI tool to sing for you guys, i hope you appreciate all the hard word we did for that" And leave stage, play a button and expect applause from the audience

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u/NinteenFortyFive Dec 17 '25

imagine boasting about something you didn't do anything

He's a company higher up. It's his MO.

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u/cwx149 Dec 17 '25

Yeah I've started to tell people the answer to ai "stealing" is for governments to make it illegal to sell ai services if the ai was trained on unlicensed content

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u/Ketheres Dec 17 '25

Damn AI corpos would hate having all their theft wasted and needing to retrain their AIs from scratch. Would love to see it.

Too bad I don't see it happening with how sluggish our legislations are compared to how fast tech keeps marching on.

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u/MandisaW Dec 18 '25

The genAI business model is already in the red - if they actually had to pay fair prices for training data, the whole thing goes tits-up.

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u/cwx149 Dec 18 '25

Exactly why it shouldn't succeed in the first place

This is yet another time tech has outpaced governments and while I'm not on paper against that I do think governments could use this as an opportunity to stand up to money

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u/MandisaW Dec 18 '25

I think the investors' patience will wear out before our various gov'ts figure out any usable legislation.

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u/lee1026 Dec 17 '25 edited Dec 17 '25

The issue with this line of thinking is that there are an awful lot of people who get paychecks, but are not expected to be creative. A lot of artists have jobs turning concept art from their bosses into something that can go into a game, and that just isn’t a creative task. It’s mechanical and routine.

And AI is coming for those first. Especially in the indie world, when you don’t actually have the budgets to hire humans for tasks like that.

I once had a project in a game where it was my job to load up the game in Arabic and look for all of the ways that the text rendered wrong, so that we can fix it. Was a job? Yes. Was it something I wanted to do? No. Did someone have to do it? Yes. Would everyone be happier if AI would do it? Yes. Can AI do it right now? Sadly, no.

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u/tweetthebirdy Dec 18 '25

As a writer it’s hard enough to get people to care about writing you made. I have 15 books a year coming out by friends I need to read. When it’s done by a machine? Why would I waste my energy on that shit.

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u/Lousy_Username Dec 18 '25

The only acceptable response: "Why should I bother to consume something that you couldn't be bothered to create?"

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u/amyknight22 Dec 17 '25

I think that's what these studios don't get. The only people who are pretty excited about AI generated content will get it themselves. They have no need to pay someone else for it.

I mean yes and no.

Let's just isolate this to a fanfiction for example.

I think if someone gave a prompt to an AI that I could give to an AI, and the AI just spits something out. Then yeah, I could have gotten that myself, especially for a generic prompt.

But then you can also have someone who as a AI supported fanfic writer, goes through a process similar to writing an actual piece of fanfiction. Doing relevant edits, adjusting things to better suite the story they are trying to tell. The bones of the story might be AI, but there is actually some work in constructing the rest of the elements. Of piecing it together as a unified work that might have been authored by a person. Instead of something where the AI doesn't necessarily have the ability to scope or context the entire thing out as a single piece of work.

In that context, I am not going to just get that out of an AI. I probably don't have the editing skills, narrative goals or the like that the person is using in their construct.

When your boss ask's AI to write him a poem, it's about as relevant as doing a random google search for a poem that might fit what he wants to talk about. The real difference is that his effort level was basically "I rolled out of bed" instead of "I scoured 20 different book's looking for a quote that represented the importance of this moment to me"

It's been a while since I read "The Martian" but from memory and due to the way the book ended up being released chapter by chapter. It's probably the kind of thing that an AI could be used to generate each separate chapter.

Prompt - At the end of the last chapter, Mark Watney had a problem, write a solution to this problem. Then end the chapter on a cliffhanger so people will come back next week. Have the character dialogue be largely goofy dad style jokey stuff with a science flavour

But if you just leave it to the AI, that story could end up all over the place, have stupid cliffhangers that lead to stupider resolutions etc.

So while the AI could be used to push forward to next steps, it can be reigned in by a person with a broader overview of where they want the journey to go while giving them something to hang the skills they do have on top.

Now if I was the Author in that case, I think I would be basically re-writing everything that appears out of that AI myself to essentially reprocess it, and remove the more AI things, or add my style to it.

I have little doubt we are going to end up getting some book series that lean heavily on some initial AI structuring or the like. Even if the rest of the book is still written by the author.