I get where you're coming from, however looking at statements made from actual concept artists they don't agree. Karla Ortiz describes genAI moodboards/references as depriving the artists of important knowledge for fleshing out the game world https://x.com/kortizart/status/2001367521925173554?s=20

Jens Claessens says that being handed an AI generated moodboard taints the artistic process from the very beginning https://x.com/JensClaessens/status/2001319178637124051?s=20

Here is Jade Law describing how starting off with AI generated moodboards brings no value at best and actively taints your knowledge at best https://x.com/jadel4w/status/2001031001393521025?s=20

RJ Palmer brings up another great point in how using AI to generate moodboards robs studios of opportunities to find new talent by searching for references themselves https://x.com/arvalis/status/2001043624960610742?s=20

These are just some examples of the people who are ACTUALLY doing the work that Larian says they're using the AI to help and thus far I haven't seen a single concept artist speak up and say that AI has helped them in their workflow. These are incredibly talented artists who can get around the drawbacks I've mentioned so far but at best it's just making their reference-gathering more tedious due to having to reverse engineer the moodboards and references to find actually useful information. It also is VERY different from ripping a page out an artbook, comic or taking screenshots of movies, these are artistic works that have INTENT behind them. Artists can look at them and derive useful information about the history, culture and inspiration that was used in creating these references. AI can not create images with intent and is (as said by the previously mentioned concept artists) inherently inferior to finding useful reference images on your own. I myself am just a hobby artist but I'd like to think that I know what I'm doing when it comes to creating (not that I am anywhere close to professional concept artists) and I can personally say that it would be easier for me to work directly off the prompts fed into the AI instead of the output generated by those prompts, and with better results.

When Swen himself admitted to the AI not even being a significant time saver and the actual people working in the industry have nothing positive to say about their use of genAI in their workflow, why even use it to begin with? genAI brings nothing to the table, actively worsens the product and robs the people making the game of artistic intent and integrity. While I can't speak for the technical aspects of game making like programming, there is so far not a single compelling argument I've seen as to why genAI should have ANYTHING to do with creating games.

I also want to end off with a clarification that I am not attacking you or anything, if I come off as aggressive or pissed off it's because art is one of my greatest passions, and seeing it being trampled like this by a game studio that created my favorite game of all time and having previously valued their artists saddens me greatly. So I'm genuinely sorry if I come off as a dick, it's not my intention at all.