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In a AMA on Reddit, Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke has now drawn a much thicker line around generative AI in Divinity, saying there “is not going to be any GenAI art in Divinity” and that the studio will refrain from using genAI tools during concept art development specifically to remove any doubt about where the game’s visuals come from. At the same time, he made it clear Larian hasn’t “sworn off AI” entirely, because the studio is still “trying things out across departments” to speed up iteration and cut waste during development.
The most headline-worthy part here is that this isn’t just another clarification about “we don’t replace artists,” it’s an actual process change: Larian says it’s choosing not to use genAI tools in concept art development anymore, explicitly because the earlier conversation caused confusion and never really stopped spiraling. Vincke’s reasoning is basically that if the studio removes genAI from that stage, there’s no argument left about whether a concept piece started life as an AI output or not, because it simply won’t.
That’s a pretty direct response to the reality of how players read “we used it for exploration” in 2026: even if the final art is human-made, people still worry about the pipeline, the training data, and whether “early exploration” gradually expands into something bigger over time.
Even with that concept art shift, Vincke also framed AI as something Larian is interested in for iteration speed, with the logic being straightforward: the more ideas you can test quickly, the better the gameplay tends to get. He says the studio’s hope is that experimenting with genAI can help refine ideas faster, create a more focused development cycle, and reduce wasted effort.
The part that’s going to matter most is the guardrail he spelled out: Larian says it will not generate “creative assets” that end up in the game unless it’s 100% sure about training-data origins and creator consent, and that if it ever does use a genAI model for in-game assets, it would be trained on data Larian owns. That’s Larian trying to address the real ethical core of the argument rather than the surface-level one, because a lot of outrage isn’t “AI exists,” it’s “what was it trained on, and who got exploited in the process.”
Adam Smith, the writing director for Larian, also addressed the writing side, and the message was just as blunt: no text generation is going to touch Divinity’s dialogue, journal entries, or other writing. He also pushed back on the idea that AI-generated placeholder text is some magical productivity unlock, saying it doesn’t really beat simple stub text, and that internal experiments with text tools were coming out at a “3/10 at best,” being treated as research rather than something headed for the actual game.
