A crazy story this week:
Stella Sacco - a former writer for the upcoming game, Rideshare Stimulator by Saber Interactive -
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 gaming media 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".
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'”.
Saber CEO Matthew 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.”
You can check more details about this in the RPS article here:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ri...the-game-also-uses-the-tech-for-in-game-music
