Saber Interactive CEO: I'd replace the fired writer with AI "in retrospect" — game to get Steam AI tag

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A writer who claims they'd been replaced on a game at Saber Interactive by literal ChatGPT has gotten several responses from the company's leadership, and they're just kind of bizarre. The publisher's CEO asserts it's all false, while also saying he'd now replace the person with AI if he could.

Let's take a couple of steps back. A couple of days ago, on August 11, Stella Sacco posted on BlueSky about Rideshare "Stimulator," a project developed by Unigine she worked on during her time at Saber. "I was lead writer on this one!" she says. "And Saber replaced me with ChatGPT midway through development. All the passenger voices were AI too."

She noted Rideshare "Stimulator"'s Steam page didn't yet reflect the use of any AI tools, either. A statement from Saber, given to Games Radar+ , roundly shoots down these claims. "Neither Saber nor Unigine have replaced any writers with AI for Rideshare or any other game," the company says. "In fact, Saber’s staff of writers has tripled since 2023. Rideshare’s story was written entirely by real people."

Sacco stuck to her guns in a follow-up comment. "They took me off the project to use ChatGPT to write the rest of the text, including planned live updates," she says. "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."

Now, Karch himself has stepped in to refute Sacco's version of events. "Stella who? I had to ask Claude because I have never spoken to her or seen her," he tells This Week In Videogames . "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."

He maintains the game's script is all human-written, adding that "were it to win an award, it would go to someone who can walk up on stage and receive it." Kind of odd phrasing - does this person who'd be receiving this hypothetical award have a name? Anyway.

Karch then claims Sacco "violated her confidentiality clause" by mentioning the game's incorporation of AI before Saber could. "It was always our intention to reveal this," he says.

"We look at our use of AI in this particular game, which will be a lower-priced title, as a plus for consumers," Karch adds. "As far as Stella is concerned, she was replaced by someone more talented and terminated for a variety of reasons a few months later. 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."

In another public post , Sacco triples down on her original comments. "I think it should be obvious to anyone who reads that statement that he’s lashing out because he did not want people to know there was AI use in the game," she writes. "Everything I said was true. 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."

I certainly wouldn't say Saber or Rideshare "Stimulator" are looking particularly good here. Generative AI is becoming pretty common in the industry, though replacing entire devs would be a whole other level of ick. At the time of writing, the game still doesn't have the AI boilerplate on Valve's marketplace.

"Once it's finalized, we will update the Steam page," Karch tells IGN when asked about this. "In Rideshare we added an unrelated experimental mode to the game to play around with these concepts. It's not the core experience. And even in this case it required us adding two writers and multiple coders to work with AI tools to try and get a reasonable result."

He defends Saber's AI use by claiming it's about helping the process rather than downsizing. "It's not and has never been about efficiencies and team reductions. Rather it's about how AI can improve the game experience," he claims.

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