Concept Artist here, the "AI hate" directed at Larian Studio is 100% ignorant and bad faith virtue-signaling. Artists are NOT against AI usage as a tool, we're against Generative AI that was trained on real artworks and mass-produced "slops" that imitated our hard work and then marketed as our replacement. In pre-production, the art team would grab random pics off the internet and other games to create a general mood board for aesthetics and "vibe" that fit the art direction (There are more nuances than this, I'm describing this in the most simplified way possible) A mood board of a character may include several pictures of other videogames or anime shows, dozens of object with "texture references" for parts of their attire, multiple reference pictures of relevant objects such as animals or historical weapons or even other character artwork made for other games; ALL of which are randomly drawn from the internet and put together for the purpose of creating an overall aesthetic for a design that will become original in its own way inspired by its references and the artist's own creativity and originality to visualize it when they create the design by doing ART. Larian Studio mentioned using AI to streamline this process; an actively menial labor of "looking for relavant and cool pics on the internet" in essence. There is zero reason why AI speeding up this process is a bad thing; it is essentially the same as someone asking Grok for facts they could have spent a few hours reading through Wikipedia pages. None of the pictures grabbed by either the AI or the art team in this process are being exploited for any monetary gain since they're simply inspiration and visual direction, this has been standard practice in the industry for decades.