Hi there, welcome back to GLTV News, I'm Alex, as always going through the afternoons latest
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movie reviews, series reviews, exclusives, interviews, world news, sports news and of
course so much more without further ado today, we're talking the big Larian AI debacle, because
basically last night Bloomberg posted a huge article with Larian's CEO Sven Binke talking
about the upcoming game Divinity which was revealed at the Game Awards, Larian's sort
of future ideas, where it wants to take the studio, how they've hired loads of people,
whether going after the mega success of Baldur's Gate 3, the fact that Baldur's Gate 3 sold
20 million copies, all that and more and yet the thing that everyone's talking about is
how Bloomberg says that Larian Studios is taking a hard approach towards, is pushing
AI hard under Sven Binke, so that has caused as usual the amount of pushback that you'd
expect from a beloved studio saying that it's going to be using AI. However, Sven Binke
has gone back against that and has said that they aren't pushing hard for replacing concept
artists with AI because something that really, really got people angry was the idea that
there's going to be artists replaced with AI because in the Bloomberg article it basically
says what is Larian using AI for and it's sort of like PowerPoint presentations, looking
into stuff and then they mention developing concept art. This is something specifically
that Binke is pushing back against. It doesn't seem like he's pushing back against the idea
of Larian using AI as a whole because he does say that they are using AI for creating concepts
and creating things that are placeholders and things like that and PowerPoint presentations
and other things that I've gone over, but he does say that basically Bloomberg kind
of got it wrong about, or people are getting it wrong with their interpretations of how
that AI answer was given, but he also says that we're not going to see any generative
AI in Divinity, the upcoming game. He said everything is human actors, we're writing
everything ourselves, pretty simply, and then in his tweet he said we use AI tools to explore
references just like we use Google and art books. At the very early ideation stages we
use it as a rough outline for composition which we replace with original concept art.
There is no comparison. So again, I would say that even though it might concern people
that Larian is pushing hard into generative AI usage for even things like image generation
and things, which are harmful to the planet as we know, this is just something that is
going to be accepted more widely by the games industry as time goes on. He did say that
it doesn't actually push forward efficiency that much, but he does hope that Larian won't
take six years like it did to make Baldur's Gate 3 to make Divinity, he reckons maybe
three to four. In any case, going off on different tangents here, sticking with the AI point,
it's something that we will see, I think, in a lot of major game releases, especially
as they try and save money and as they try and also make things a little bit more streamlined.
We're still yet to see really what generative AI can really, really do and how impressive
it could potentially be because there's a lot of hype around the technology but there's
not a lot of results in terms of things that have actually pleased everyone. There's either
the AI bros saying this is the end of yada yada industry or there's the people going,
well actually this doesn't really impress me because it's got no soul to it.
Where do you fall on the AI argument? Do you agree that Sven Rinker is right to be pushing
it forward? It seems he says that everyone at Larian has accepted it but there's some
pushback on that on mine as well. But yeah, we'll talk more about this, I'm sure. Until
then, I'll see you tomorrow for more GITV News. Goodbye.