Larian Studios has been taking some heat of late due to the apparent use of generative AI in the conceptualization process of development. One of the leads on Baldur's Gate 3 and the upcoming new Divinity game took an opportunity to quell concerns, making it clear such tools aren’t being used for any actual scripting because, to be blunt, what they make is generally terrible.
Adam Smith, writing director at Larian, responded to a question on the subject during a Reddit AMA. "We don't have any text generation touching our dialogues, journal entries, or other writing in Divinity," he says, unequivocally dispelling the idea of the technology encroaching on actual creativity.
He goes further, responding to whether using generative text as a placeholder helps game production with a simple, "it doesn't," before expanding on Larian's process. "We had a limited group experimenting with tools to generate text, but the results hit a 3/10 at best and those tools are for research purposes, not for use in Divinity," Smith writes.
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"Even my worst first drafts - and there are a LOT of them - are at least a 4/10 (although Swen might disagree)," he continues, "and the amount of iteration required to get even individual lines to the quality we want is enormous."
There are a "great many eyes and hands" that touch any given line or piece of text before something ships, he says to finish. That's something which shouldn't be under-appreciated: large studios have layers of approval for each department. For a company like Larian, producing RPGs as deep as Baldur's Gate 3 and the Divinity series, no creative choice is an island, and utilizing ChatGPT or whatever derivatives simply can't substitute for actual collaboration.
Smith's other point stands, too. The slop this software produces is subpar to human hands in every meaningful way, and any feedback session would only make that even clearer. However the next Divinity stands up, it'll be due to the hard work of Larian's devs all the way around.
