Saber Interactive CEO Matt Karch confirmed that writers used generative AI to help produce dialogue for the upcoming driving game Rideshare Stimulator, while denying the company replaced any human writers with AI. The confirmation follows a contentious public dispute with a former employee who said she was replaced by ChatGPT.
Karch told Game File that the game's writers used AI prompts to generate driver-passenger dialogues, which they then edited for an "experimental" free-ride side mode. The game's main script was written entirely by humans, the company said.
The dispute began on social media
The controversy started Monday when Game File reported that the game's July 30th debut trailer included digs at a rival gaming executive. The next day, former writer Stella Sacco posted on social media that she had been replaced on the project in late 2023.
"I was lead writer on this one! And Saber replaced me with ChatGPT midway through development," Sacco wrote. "All the passenger voices were AI too. Either they changed direction at some point or they're not disclosing it on Steam."
Saber issued a statement Tuesday denying the replacement claim. "Neither Saber nor Unigine have replaced any writers with AI for Rideshare or any other game," the company said. "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."
The statement added that Saber's writing staff has tripled since 2023 and that "None of our 3,000+ employees have to worry about being replaced by AI."
How the AI dialogue generation works
When asked for more detail on how AI would generate an "infinite" number of passenger dialogues without racking up costly server charges, Karch explained via a spokesperson that the process happens offline in batches.
The dialogues are produced offline via prompts created by our writers (and verified to ensure they are within guardrails). The prompts are intended to elicit a wide range of topics that include current events. The dialogues are then uploaded to everyone and played only once for any given gamer. We don't allow the player to prompt dialogues.
Saber's PR representative said an AI disclosure on the game's Steam page is forthcoming. Valve began requiring developers to disclose any-88 use in 2024, a policy that later reached to distinguish between AI used for development efficiency versus AI generating in-game content.
Karch escalates against former employee
In the course of answering questions about the game, Karcher made his own views of the former writer clear. When asked about the claim that the game's story was "written entirely by real people," he said: "Humans wrote the story, all of it. I mean it's not Shakespeare level prose but it's better than Claude could produce. But frankly from what I hear from my team that statement might not apply to the writer in question."
He went further in later comments to the gaming outlet, saying: "Stella who? I had to ask Claude because I have never spoken to her or seen her…As far as Stella is concerned, she was replaced by someone more talentedly and terminated for a variety of reasons a few months later."
Sacco responded: "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. 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."
Why this matters for writers
This dispute illustrates a tension hiding in plain sight across the industry: companies that publicly pledge not to replace writers with AI are simultaneously integrating generative tools into writing workflows in ways that can be hard to see from the outside. The distinction between "AI-assisted" and "AI-generated" content is often thin, and given the pressure to cut costs, the definitions cross quickly.
The factual dispute here is real - Saber says anyone could have several games using AI for an "endless" mode, while Sacco says her contract was terminated after ChatGPT came in. But the practical question for working professionals isn't whether it happened, but how common it is for AI to be present in a project's early phases without clearly showing up in credits or product pages. The Steam disclosure requirement currently only covers AI use in game development, not necessarily the human editing of AI-produced drafts that is now said to be a regular workflow.
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