OK, yeah, I get what you mean now.

I don't agree on a fundamental level, though. Anything and everything could go to shit at any time. You could get killed on a bus stop, your favourite grocery brand might be outed to be using slave labour, Larian could start using AI instead of human work for everything...

With that approach, might as well hide in the woods, disconnect from civilisation and wait for the world to end.

I personally reject that attitude. I think we should support what's good while it's good and stop supporting it when it goes bad. And, to me, the way Larian uses AI is not "it went bad already". Like it or not, the tools exist. They're everywhere. A single (small-ish) company rejecting its use out of principle is not going to make a dent on that, it won't even be registered within the margin of error among the billions, if not trillions, of monthly impressions AI companies get from teenagers talking to chat-bots.

And even if it did, it doesn't matter - AI companies are not making profit anyway. Actually, fewer users is better for them, because they're actively losing money every time someone uses their product. The whole AI bubble is propped up on the largest circlejerk in history and users are the least important, if not flat out insignificant, aspect of it.

I think there are good ways to use AI. Like Corridor Crew, using it to create things that are just financially completely out of their range. It can allow people to bridge the gap between small and massive productions.

And don't get me wrong, the fact that it's originally trained on stolen data is important, but... Kind of irrelevant in this case - and that's for two reasons:

1. Companies like Corridor Crew mostly use AI that they self-train, which means that no stealing happens. We don't know what Larian does.
2. Even if Larian uses publicly available models that are trained on stolen data... fuck me, we should be going after the people who stole the data, not the end users!

Would I prefer if they didn't use AI at all? Sure! But am I going to start shitting on the entire company just because they do? Hell no! Their products are still made with care and love and humanity at their core. Just listen to interviews from Jennifer English or Neil Newbon - they praise both the VO company and Larian for their amazing approach.

And finally - the "war on Larian" would make much more sense if we also learned that they're firing concept artists - but they're doing the opposite - they have open positions for concept artists, character artists, environment artists, etc., etc. They're currently hiring these people!

So, yeah, it's just a lot of noise over practically nothing, in my opinion.