There are AI's that are ethically trained. There are AI's that run on local hardware. We'll eventually need AI ratings to distinguish use types, I suppose.

There's more to AI than LLM.

No one [intelligent] is using an LLm for workflow organization. Despite what the media will try to convince you, Not every AI is an LLM or even and LLM trained on all the copyrighted shit you can find in the Internet.

Yup! Certifying a workflow as AI-free would be a monumental task now. First, you'd have to designate exactly what kinds of AI you mean, which is a harder task than I think people realize. Then, you'd have to identify every instance of that kind of AI in every tool you might use. And just looking at Adobe, there's a lot. Then you, what, forbid your team from using them, sure, but how do you monitor that? Ya can't uninstall generative fill from Photoshop. Anyway, that's why anything with a complicated design process marked "AI-Free" is going to be the equivalent of greenwashing, at least for a while. But they should be able to prevent obvious slop from being in the final product just in regular testing.

You know it doesn't have to be all or nothing, right?

In the early design phase, for example, quick placeholder objects are invaluable for composing a scene. Say you want a dozen different effigies built from wood and straw -- you let the clanker churn them out. If you like them, an environment artist can replace them with bespoke models, as detailed and as optimized as the scene needs it. If you don't like them, you can just chuck them in the trash and you won't have wasted the work of an artist, who can work on artwork that will actually appear in the released product.

Larian haven't done anything to make me question their credibility in this matter.

At a certain level, it is going to be a chore to determine who is or is not slopping up with AI media. Not every asset comes out with six fingers and a half-melted face.

Image/video diffusion is a tiny subset of genAI. I'd bet nothing purely autogenerated makes it into a game.

I can see legitimate frustration with an industry that seems reliant on increasingly generic and interchangeable assets. AI just becomes the next iteration of this problem. You’ve expanded the warehouse of prefab images, but you’re still stuck with end products that are uncannily similar to everything else on the market.

See above. And in many spaces, there are a sea of models to choose from, and an easy ability to tune them to whatever style you want.

And that’s before you get to the IP implications of farming all your content out to a third party that doesn’t seem to care where its base library is populated from.

Thier tools can be totally in house, disconnected from the outside web, if they wish. They might just be a part of the pipeline on their graphics workstations.

Keep a distinction between "some machine learning in tedious parts of our workflows" and "a partnership with Big Tech APIs." Those are totally different things.

It sounds like Larian is talking about the former, and I'm not worried about any loss of creativity from that.

At a certain level, it is going to be a chore to determine who is or is not slopping up with AI media. Not every asset comes out with six fingers and a half-melted face.

That's a good point. I think a lot of people are dismissing AI content because there's this fallacy and desire to believe it's all "slop". It's willfully ignorant to wave it all away like that. Sure, we've all seen the stupid stuff, and it's really annoying, but we absorb the good stuff without even knowing it. Anyone claiming they can reliably spot AI generated images is fooling themselves even at this early stage.

I'd like to know when something is real, especially real art and even pictures of nature, but I don't think I can.