AINEWS
CEO says Rideshare Stimulator's story was 'written entirely by real people,' but the Steam page doesn't flag its AI mode. The former lead writer says ChatGPT replaced her.
Saber Interactive says it did not replace any writers with AI on its new driving sim, Rideshare "Stimulator." The game's former lead writer says the company replaced her with ChatGPT partway through development. The two statements cannot both be the full story, and the game's Steam listing still does not disclose generative-AI use even though the studio now concedes at least one mode requires it.
Saber CEO Matthew Karch denied the allegation in a statement to The Verge, saying "[n]either Saber nor Unigine have replaced any writers with AI" and that "the story was written entirely by real people" on the project (The Verge). He added that "none of our 3,000+ employees have to worry about being replaced by AI" at the studio, which he said was founded in 2001 and now employs more than 3,000 people.
Stella Sacco, who says she was lead writer on Rideshare Stimulator until she was told she was being replaced in December 2023, pushed back in a Bluesky post cited by The Verge: "I was lead writer on this one! And Saber replaced me with ChatGPT midway through development. All the passenger voices were AI too." In a follow-up statement to The Verge, she argued the two accounts are not compatible: "you can't meaningfully say both 'writers wrote the story' and 'computers wrote the text'" (The Verge).
The dispute has narrowed to a single carve-out. Karch concedes Rideshare Stimulator will ship with "an experimental, free-ride mode that by necessity incorporates AI as the number of passengers in the game is infinite" (The Verge). That mode is where Saber and Sacco's accounts most clearly diverge: the studio frames it as a sandbox for procedurally generated passenger chatter, while Sacco describes an AI-generated voice pipeline that ran during her tenure on the project. Saber describes the game as an "immersive driving simulation game" developed with Unigine and announced last month.
Re-reports of the dispute by PC Gamer, The Gamer, Insider Gaming, and Neon Lights add no new facts beyond The Verge's original reporting.
The Steam store page for Rideshare Stimulator does not currently flag generative-AI use under Valve's existing AI-disclosure policy (Steam listing). That policy asks developers to declare live-generated AI content at submission and to keep that disclosure current as features change. The omission is a point-in-time fact as of this week, not a permanent property of the listing, and it cuts against Karch's own concession that the experimental mode requires AI to function at all.
Saber and Sacco are not actually arguing about the same thing. Saber is saying the campaign's narrative was written by humans; Sacco is saying her work on that narrative was cut short and replaced. Both could be technically true if the credits show a human lead writer through the end of the main campaign, and if the AI work is confined to the free-ride mode that Karch already names. Neither side has yet published the credits or a clear product boundary that would let the public verify which framing is right.
Until they do, the lever a reader has today is the disclosure gap. The Steam AI label is a single field on the store page; the credits list is a public document. Workers, players, and studios can ask for both. The contradiction is the headline; the disclosure question is what survives it.