Tim Willits, chief creative officer at Saber Interactive, has given his own take on CEO Matthew Karch’s response to accusations that a writer at the company had been replaced with ChatGPT.
Stella Sacco said in August that she was the lead writer on Saber Interactive’s upcoming Rideshare Stimulator, but Saber “replaced me with ChatGPT midway through development.” Karch responded with a scathing statement, 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 talented and terminated for a variety of reasons a few months later.”
Sacco responded with her own statement, saying: “Everything I said was true. Here’s more truth: that statement is remarkably pathetic for the CEO of any company to be making.”
At Gamescom, GamesIndustry.biz asked Willits for his take on the public spat. “That’s just Matt’s sarcasm, that’s all,” he said.
“But the important thing is that we’ve never replaced anybody with AI. That’s crazy. And we don’t use generative AI in Space Marine, and Hellraiser, and Stuntman, and everything.
“But we are experimenting with it, because we don’t know where in the industry it’s going to be effective, where people will like it, where it’s useful. So the game that we don’t even have here, but we announced [Rideshare Stimulator], we are experimenting with it with the AI mode. Very clear that the other stuff was all written by humans. Even the side missions were all written by humans.”
The AI disclosure on the Steam page for Rideshare Stimulator states that the “main Campaign story, characters, and dialogue are written by a team of human writers”, while AI tools are “used for voice generation and some localization.”
It adds that the “optional Free Ride mode includes AI-generated passenger missions and localized dialogue,” and that the game’s radio stations feature a mix of human-made music and AI-generated music.
“I bet at next year’s Gamescom, I think we’ll have some bigger games that actually focus on [AI]”
Willits said that Saber doesn’t use generative AI in its production pipelines in terms of things like code, environments, or textures.
However, he said that in the future, we will probably see a developer “come up with such a clever and brilliant use case for true modern AI integration into an experience where everyone will be like, ‘Oh, that’s it’, and everyone will understand that that’s how it can be. But until that happens, it’s like other technologies throughout history. When they first come out, people are like, ‘What are we going to do with this technology? How’s it going to work?’ And then we all discover that it’ll fit into everyday life.”
“It will be interesting to see where it goes. And I bet at next year’s Gamescom, I think we’ll have some bigger games that actually focus on it. And I’m curious to see how it plays out for us, I’m curious to see how it works in our Rideshare game, and how people are going to like it, and how it’s integrated. It’s a great experiment.”
The full GamesIndustry.biz interview with Willits will be published tomorrow.