To which Larian Studios replied that, yes, of course, they are using AI placeholder artwork for the production of their freshly announced Divinity game. Causing more outrage from people who have no idea how games are made. To me, with my history as a dungeon master for roleplaying games like D&D, the idea is pretty obvious: The creative person that is designing a scene for a game is not necessarily the creative person that will ultimately provide the artwork. A game designer might decide that his game needs red barrels that explode when hit, and put a placeholder red barrel in. Later in the process, a person in a coordinating role sees that the game needs a final image for a red barrel that looks explosive, and then asks a graphic artists to draw that image, with maybe an art director checking the coherence of that image with the graphic style of the rest of the game.

Some people might remember having played alpha or beta or early access versions of some game, where not all placeholder art had yet been replaced by the final artwork. In older games that was often rather obvious, the placeholder being something like a purple cube. Those had the advantage of being obviously placeholders and easy to spot in quality control. But I can totally see the advantage for the game designer to use an AI generated placeholder artwork in the design process. Not good enough for release, but easier for game design and communication to already have art that somewhat resembles the object you want to depict.

As a DM, my creative output was the adventure, the story I was trying to tell. As I can't draw, I could only ever use "stolen" artwork when I felt a scene needed an illustration. And trying to find an illustration that more or less fit to the story I had created was cumbersome. I would have loved the ability to create AI art for that. I totally understand why the people who create the stories for games like Clair Obscur or Divinity might want to use AI art for these placeholders, as it makes it easier for them to see whether an idea for a scene works. For a computer game, for which the art is a selling point (which wasn't the case for my privately run D&D adventures), you then need an art director and quality control to make sure that any placeholder artwork is replaced by a better version created by an actual artist. You don't want the final customer to see the intermediate placeholder, for the same reason that you don't want your client to see all the drafts and sketches of everything. As Bismarck said, it's like sausages, it is better not to see how things are made.

I think that the Indie Game Awards rescinding the awards for Clair Obscur, or people complaining that Larian is using AI to make Divinity, is an exaggerated reaction and part of a general AI panic that is as unnecessary as it is unhelpful. It is like complaining that Rembrandt used coal drawings to make sketches for his oil paintings. Making a computer game with a large team is most certainly an iterative process, in which intermediate steps like sketches and placeholders are very necessary. One placeholder slipping by quality control is a minor error. Using that to create headlines that might make people think that the excellent art of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was produced by AI is disingenuous. And there won't be any AI art in Divinity either. Larian described their use of AI as "an optional tool for devs that want to generate a reference image for Larian's concept artists to use". I find that is a totally valid use of AI generative art.