Man, this is very disappointing. I've had a read into these three articles from IGN, Gamespot, and a different Gamespot article from earlier this year to get a read on the situation and while it's nice I guess that they're still painting, I do want to highlight this little bit, a tweet by Michael Douse, director of publishing at Larian:
(Here is the link to the tweet)
So. I am a concept artist. I have used AI (Midjourney and Stable Diffusion) for image generation at my previous job in marketing. And I have spent a lot of hours searching for references, and sometimes the hours spent have been too many (as in, I later didn't have time to develop my ideas as well as I wanted). And so I saw this tweet and now I have several (unpolished) thoughts and I'm gonna write them down here:
AI is not a good reference tool: it is a) prone to be wrong, and this is especially condemning for design, where the devil is often in the details, b) will bring you the statistically most likely outcome, which tends to be boring, c) narrows down the scope of possible solutions to only what is being generated (when you search, you sift through much more material that you have to either accept or reject; this widens your scope of visual imput even if you end up rejecting half of it. Concept art is a process defined so strongly by what is not chosen), d) you start the design process with the idea instead of letting a visual surprise and inspire you (AI will only spit out what you ask for. No suddenly finding something totally unrelated and going "hang on, this is cool!")
Generating references is not more time-saving than searching the internet or looking through a book: especially if you know what you are looking for. There are tons of databases, museum collections, and "An Overview on Fashion"-type books where you will find what you need much quicker than by coming up with, typing, and refining a prompt, and then checking that you got something actually useful. If one really wanted to make reference gathering easier, the answer to that would be a huge, well-structured, well-tagged database of images, not a tool to generate images
Using AI "just for reference" does not address the problem with AI: which is the environmental consequences huge datacenters are having, the soaring prices of computer art, and the fact that AI has been trained without the knowledge, consent or participation of those who have created a large part of the training material
Again, very disappointing situation. But also: reference gathering? It's just weird at this point
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