Saber Interactive has confirmed that its taxi game Rideshare “Stimulator” uses generative AI, while denying a former lead writer's claim that she was replaced by ChatGPT during development. Rock Paper Shotgun published the studio's statement after writer Stella Sacco raised the allegation on Bluesky.
I was lead writer on this one! And Saber replaced me with ChatGPT midway through development. All the passenger voices were AI too. Either they changed direction at some point or they're not disclosing it on Steam.
Saber rejected that account. “Neither Saber nor Unigine have replaced any writers with AI for Rideshare or any other game,” the company said. “In fact, Saber's staff of writers has tripled since 2023. Rideshare's story was written entirely by real people.” The statement added that the game will feature an experimental free-ride mode that “by necessity incorporates AI as the number of passengers in the game is infinite,” and that none of its 3,000-plus employees have to worry about being replaced by AI.
Asked to expand on that mode, Saber said every passenger picked up in free ride is a random NPC, and that giving those characters “a limitless number of things that they could say” could only be achieved through large language models and voice generation.
Sacco followed up with a screenshot of a Facebook status dated December 2023 reading “I got replaced on one of my games at work. With ChatGPT.” She told PC Gamer that Saber “took me off the project to use ChatGPT to write the rest of the text, including planned live updates.”
Karch escalates, then apologises
Saber chief executive Matt Karch escalated the dispute in a statement to This Week in Video Games that opened “Stella who?” and said she “was replaced by someone more talented and terminated for a variety of reasons a few months later.” Sacco called the remarks “remarkably pathetic for the CEO of any company to be making,” and said they would do more damage to Saber's reputation than to hers.
Sacco later said on Bluesky that Karch had sent her a long private email in which he “apologized unreservedly” for the way he had spoken about her in the press, and that she accepted the apology while keeping her position on AI unchanged. Karch has not apologised publicly, Video Games Chronicle reported, but posted on LinkedIn about “the unwritten rules and expectations placed on modern CEOs.”
The Steam page has since been updated with an AI-generated content disclosure, stating that the main campaign uses AI voice generation, that Free Ride mode contains AI-written dialogue, and that its radio stations mix human-made and AI-generated music. Valve requires developers to declare generative AI use when submitting a game, and to explain what guardrails stop it producing illegal content; no such disclosure was present when the claims first surfaced.
Rideshare drew attention before the AI row for jabs at Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford in its reveal trailer. Karch told Gamefile that “the dig is because Randy took shots at Embracer in Borderlands 4.”
