Former Saber writer claims she was replaced by ChatGPT during development on its ridesharing game

A former lead writer at Saber Interactive claims she was replaced by ChatGPT during the development of its upcoming ridesharing game.

Earlier this week it was reported that a trailer for Saber’s Rideshare ‘Stimulator’ contained digs aimed at Gearbox president Randy Pitchford, in response to criticism aimed at former parent company Embracer Group in Borderlands 4.

Saber CEO Matt Karch confirmed that the jokes in the trailer were indeed aimed at Pitchford, but the story caught the eye of former lead writer Stella Sacco, who then claimed on Bluesky that she had been replaced on Rideshare ‘Stimulator’ in favour of AI writing tools.

“I didn’t see this had been announced,” Sacco posted. “I was lead writer on this one! And Saber replaced me with ChatGPT midway through development.

“All the passenger voices were AI too,” she added. “Either they changed direction at some point or they’re not disclosing it on Steam.”

Sacco then posted a screenshot of a message she wrote on Facebook back in  December 2023, which read: “I got replaced on one of my games at work. With ChatGPT.”

She also claimed that her boss tried to push back against the decision to start using AI in the game, and that she tried to tell Karch that players would only become less in favour over time.

“My boss, to his credit, argued over and over with the C-level [executive] who pushed the AI – ‘we already have Stella and she’s funny and she’s good at this, she’s done live games before so live ops are no problem’, etc”, she wrote. “But the suit insisted ‘gamers love new tech’ so using AI would be ‘great marketing’.”

She added: “When this edict came down, I warned Matt Karch, who made the AI push, that players hated AI in December 2023 and they’d hate it even more by the time the game came out. I told him this pushback would happen. He didn’t listen to me, he didn’t listen to my boss, he seemingly didn’t listen to anyone at all.”

Responding to Sacco’s claims, Saber provided a statement to PC Gamer denying that it replaced her or any other writer with AI, but stating that it was indeed using AI in the game’s development, something that has not yet been disclosed on the game’s Steam page.

“Neither Saber nor Unigine have replaced any writers with AI for Rideshare or any other game,” the studio told the publication. “In fact, Saber’s staff of writers has tripled since 2023. Rideshare’s story was written entirely by real people.

“The game will also feature an experimental, free-ride mode that by necessity incorporates AI as the number of passengers in the game is infinite. We are firm believers in using AI tools to improve or enhance gameplay experiences and improve NPC behavior as we have done since Saber was founded in 2001.

“As the industry has continued to contract, Saber continues to hire. None of our 3000+ employees have to worry about being replaced by AI.”

It’s not clear whether, by stating that by “Rideshare’s story was written entirely by real people”, the statement refers to the general plot of the game, its cutscenes or the dialogue spoken by all the passengers in the game.

It also doesn’t appear to address Sacco’s claims that the passenger voices are also generated by AI, something that technically wouldn’t affect the writers.

When presented with Saber’s statement, Sacco told PC Gamer: “They can say what they want – I was there, I even posted on Facebook about it at the time, and I have mentioned it on Bluesky several times without using the game’s title.

“They took me off the project to use ChatGPT to write the rest of the text, including planned live updates. 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.”