Larian's head writer has a simple answer for how AI-generated text helps development: 'It doesn't,' thanks to its best output being 'a 3/10 at best' worse than his worst drafts
My worst drafts are a 5/10 but I might have lower standards.
(Image credit: Larian)
In its big Divinity AMA yesterday, Larian clarified its use of generative AI tools in development: No AI art or concept art, but the studio is leaving the door open for other applications like using machine learning—and potentially generative AI, it's unclear where it draws the line in some of its communication—to help clean up and resize motion captured animation.
One other use that was shot down definitively, however, is AI-generated text, placeholder or final. User AmihanTheStoic asked about AI text in the context of the no AI art promise. Specifically, how generated placeholder text helps development, and whether "good enough" AI placeholder text might make it to the final game, voiding Larian's promise to keep generated assets out of Divinity.
"The stance applies to writing as well. We don't have any text generation touching our dialogues, journal entries or other writing in Divinity," said writing director Adam Smith. "To answer your second question, 'how does generated placeholder text benefit development over simple stub text'—it doesn't.
"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. Even my worst first drafts—and there are a LOT of them—are at least a 4/10 (although Swen might disagree :p), and the amount of iteration required to get even individual lines to the quality we want is enormous. From the initial stub to the line we record and ship, there are a great many eyes and hands involved in getting a dialogue right."
That lines up with the AI-generated text I've seen out in the wild: Whether it's Grok, Claude, or ChatGPT, people can never seem to get the genAI stink off, a by turns smarmy and sycophantic tone that I find utterly repulsive. At a certain point, editing bad writing is just more work than starting from scratch.
I am curious now, though, whether Smith was intimating that company boss Swen Vincke is a gentler critic of his worst work, or even harsher. Regardless, we also learned from the AMA that Original Sin 2's broken flawless armor system won't be making a return in Divinity, as well as how the dev team is thinking about save scumming while designing the game.