"AI can and should help shape gamer experiences."

Image credit: Saber Interactive

Amid the row between Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch and former writer Stella Sacco after he said he'd have "been happy to replace" her with AI, the studio has finally added the AI disclaimer to Rideshare Stimulator's Steam page that had been conspicuously missing since the game first went live for wishlisting on 30th July.

Initially, Karch said the disclaimer would come "once [the game was] finalised", but the store has since been updated to include the AI disclosure.

Image credit: Steam

"Once it's finalised we will update the Steam page," Karch told IGN just before the weekend (and notably, before Sacco acknowledged the CEO had apologised privately to her for his statement). "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. Maybe we are bad at business, but the net cost of incorporating these features was significantly higher than leaving them out."

However, the disclosure is more detailed than Karch's comments let on. It states that the main campaign's story, characters and dialogue are written entirely by human writers, with AI tools used only for voice generation and some localisation.

The AI use Karch was actually referring to sits in a separate, optional Free Ride mode, which includes AI-generated passenger missions and localised dialogue – a mode the disclosure notes "can be skipped by players who prefer to experience only human-written narrative content".

It also confirms the game's radio stations mix human-made and AI-generated music, with AI-generated stations "clearly labelled as such" in-game.

Karch used the moment to defend Saber's use of AI more broadly, saying his "PR team is always terrified by even broaching the subject" but that he'd be happy to have "a reasonable conversation about how AI can and should help shape gamer experiences".

He also dismissed the wider controversy as a "publicity stunt," pointing out that Saber's writing staff has grown since Sacco left the company three years ago, adding that if he wanted publicity for Rideshare Stimulator, "I guess I have Stella to thank for it."

Karch has since apologised to Sacco, and she has accepted it.

"Apologies are simply in too short a supply these days to spurn one when it's offered," she wrote, adding: "God willing, this is the last statement I'll need to make about this."

Mentioned in this article