Saber Interactive have belatedly updated the Steam page for Unigine’s chatty gig-work game Rideshare Stimulator with a disclosure about generative AI usage, following a withering back-and-forth between the game’s former writer Stella Sacco and Saber CEO Matthew Karch.

To catch you up, in case you had the good fortune to miss all the yelling earlier in the week: Sacco was lead writer at Saber from July 2023 to July 2024. On Tuesday 11th, responding to Rideshare Stimulator’s announcement trailer, she posted on Bluesky that “Saber replaced me with ChatGPT midway through development”, adding that the game makes use of generative AI tools for passenger voices.

In a statement to RPS and other sites, Saber shot back that “neither Saber nor Unigine have replaced any writers with AI for Rideshare or any other game”, insisting that “Rideshare’s story was written entirely by real people”, and that “none of our 3000+ employees have to worry about being replaced by AI.”

They did, however, acknowledge that Rideshare Stimulator has “an experimental, free-ride mode that by necessity incorporates AI as the number of passengers in the game is infinite.” There was no associated disclosure on the game’s Steam page at the time of announcement, which means that Saber have breached Valve’s content policies.

Saber argue that the use of LLMs and voice generation in Rideshare’s free-ride mode is necessary to avoid your passengers eventually repeating themselves and becoming “predictable”. I can’t really see the appeal of this functionality, myself. If you’re that desperate for total spontaneity, why not have a conversation with a fellow human, rather than trapping a stochastic parrot in the back of your make-believe Toyota Prius?

Sacco doubled down following Saber’s initial response. “They took me off the project to use ChatGPT to write the rest of the text, including planned live updates,” she insisted in an email chat with Percival Gamer. “If they changed plans in the intervening years, that’s great, but again: I was there, and it was my job to write the game, and then it wasn’t once Matt Karch decided using ChatGPT would be great publicity for the game.”

Sacco added on Bluesky that her manager at Unigine had argued with the executives against using ChatGPT, but that “the suit insisted ‘gamers love new tech’ so using AI would be ‘great marketing’”. Seems the suit hadn’t been paying much attention to the internet, at the time: there is plenty of negativity about generative AI in enthusiast circles, hence executives like Tim Sweeney demanding that Valve stop requiring publishers to post disclosures.

Karch then decided to stick his oar in personally, sending This Week In Videogames a catty statement touting his own usage of chatbot tools, and accusing Sacco of lying to whip up scandal. “Stella who?” Karch wrote. “I had to ask Claude because I have never spoken to her or seen her. We have already said we are using AI for certain parts of the game and will update the Steam page once we have finalized the feature set.

“Let me clarify that the entire story script, were it to win an award, would go to someone who can walk up on stage and receive it,” Karch went on. “It was always our intention to reveal this until Stella violated her confidentiality clause and revealed this before we were ready.”

Rideshare Stimulator’s usage of generative AI is a “plus for customers”, Karch insisted. “As far as Stella is concerned, she was replaced by someone more talented and terminated for a variety of reasons a few months later,” he said. “From what I can gather she enjoys controversy even more than I do. I would frankly in retrospect have been happy to replace her with AI. At least we would be dealing with someone programmed to be honest.”

Sacco responded to Karch on Bluesky, accusing him of “lashing out” because Saber have been caught with their trousers down. “Everything I said was true,” she said. “Here’s more truth: that statement is remarkably pathetic for the CEO of any company to be making, and combined with the AI use it will do far more damage to Saber’s reputation than it ever could mine. This screed will be many people’s first exposure to the Saber brand.”

Karch has also spoken to Ian Games. He claims Rideshare’s free-ride mode actually “required us adding two writers and multiple coders to work with AI tools to try and get a reasonable result”, and that “the net cost of incorporating these features was significantly higher than leaving them out”. Which doesn’t seem like a great advert for generative AI, even if it gets Saber off the hook about “replacing” staff. Karch added that Saber have increased the size of their writing team since 2023, throwing in the jab that “if I wanted publicity for this little game though, then I guess I have Stella to thank for it.”

“My PR team is always terrified by even broaching the subject but I would be happy to engage in a reasonable conversation about how AI can and should help shape gamer experiences,” he said. “It’s not and has never been about efficiencies and team reductions. Rather it’s about how AI can improve the game experience.

“Saber owns Digic, one of the best cinematics studios in the industry,” Karch went on. “Believe me we have no interest in having this powerhouse of a team replaced by AI tools that seem to get better by the week. For this reason we need to stay ahead of these tools and that requires hiring. It’s swim or die. Of course we need to have a mastery of these tools as well.”

Whatever the truth of the matter regarding Sacco, there is plenty of evidence that company executives at large see generative AI adoption as a pretext for shedding staff. When Microsoft announced plans to lay off thousands last year, their CEO nebulously framed it as part of the process of adapting for “the era of AI”. According to the Financial Times, EA’s new owners are betting on genAI uptake to help them cut costs and pay off an $18 billion loan.

As for the long-awaited Rideshare Stimulator Steam disclosure, it actually goes beyond what Saber have already revealed. Turns out the game also uses generative AI for in-game music. Great stuff. That’s a whole other can of worms, and do you know, if I have to write another word about generative AI today I may just up and die. Here’s the disclosure in full.

The main Campaign story, characters, and dialogue are written by a team of human writers. AI tools are used for voice generation and some localization.

The optional Free Ride mode includes AI-generated passenger missions and localized dialogue. Free Ride mode is separate from the main Campaign and can be skipped by players who prefer to experience only human-written narrative content.

The game also includes a mix of radio stations featuring human-made music and AI-generated music. Stations containing AI-generated music are clearly labeled as such in the game.