Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch is denying that his studio replaced human writers with ChatGPT on Rideshare Stimulator, the driving simulator announced last month and developed by Saber-owned Unigine. "Neither Saber nor Unigine have replaced any writers with AI," Karch said in a statement issued August 12, 2026, responding to a public accusation from the game's former lead writer.
That writer, Stella Sacco, disputes the denial directly. In a Bluesky post that kicked off the story, Sacco said she was the lead writer on Rideshare Stimulator and that Saber cut her from the project in December 2023, replacing her output with ChatGPT-generated dialogue for the game's simulated passengers.
“I was lead writer on this one! And Saber replaced me with ChatGPT midway through development. All the passenger voices were AI too. Either they changed direction at some point or they're not disclosing it on Steam.”— Stella Sacco, Former lead writer, Rideshare Stimulator
The teaser trailer Saber released last month appears to back at least part of Sacco's account. The riders shown being picked up feature what look like AI-generated voice performances and AI-written lines. The game's Steam listing carries no generative AI disclosure, which Valve has required since 2024 for titles that ship AI-generated content.
Key facts
- 01Saber CEO Matthew Karch: 'Neither Saber nor Unigine have replaced any writers with AI' on Rideshare Stimulator.
- 02Former lead writer Stella Sacco says Saber told her in December 2023 she was being replaced by ChatGPT.
- 03The game's Steam listing carries no generative AI disclosure as of August 12, 2026.
- 04Karch says Saber has 3,000+ employees and 'none' need to worry about being replaced by AI.
- 05Saber concedes an 'experimental, free-ride mode' uses AI because passenger counts are infinite.
Saber, founded in 2001, is one of the larger mid-tier studios in the industry, with more than 3,000 employees across offices working on both original titles and work-for-hire. Karch used the headcount as part of his defense, arguing the studio has been expanding while the broader games industry contracts.
His fuller statement carves out a specific exception. Karch acknowledged the game ships with a mode that uses generative AI by design, distinct from the scripted story content he says human writers produced.
“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”— Matthew Karch, CEO of Saber Interactive
Sacco's rebuttal focuses on that carve-out. She argues the two claims — that writers wrote the story, and that AI generates passenger dialogue — cannot both be true if AI-generated rides sit alongside the ones she wrote before being let go.
"If rides I wrote are in there, and also rides AI wrote or will write are in there, then AI was still used, and I was still replaced, just as Saber told me they were doing in December 2023," Sacco said in a message sent to reporters. "They're trying to have it both ways."
“My indignation at being called a liar by that statement aside, you can't meaningfully say both 'writers wrote the story' and 'computers wrote the text'.”— Stella Sacco, Former lead writer, Rideshare Stimulator
The dispute lands in an unresolved area of games-industry labor policy. Studios have increasingly used generative AI for NPC dialogue, background chatter, and procedurally infinite content — exactly the free-ride mode Karch describes — while separately maintaining that scripted narrative work remains human-authored. Writers displaced from those procedural systems argue the distinction obscures the actual loss of paid work.
Steam's disclosure policy is the other pressure point. Valve requires developers to declare whether AI-generated content ships in their games, including for pre-generated dialogue and voice work. Rideshare Stimulator's current storefront makes no such declaration, and Saber has not said whether one will be added before release.
Neither side has produced documentation. Sacco has not published the December 2023 communication she references, and Saber has not disclosed how much of the shipped dialogue is AI-generated versus human-written. That leaves a factual dispute that Steam's disclosure requirement, not a press exchange, is likely to resolve when the game ships.
The Rideshare Stimulator fight is the kind of granular labor dispute that will define the next two years of AI adoption in creative industries. The frontier-model story is about capability; this one is about the seam between marketing statements and shipped credits. Studios that want to claim they haven't replaced writers with AI are going to have to reconcile that claim with Steam disclosure pages, contract records, and — increasingly — the writers themselves posting receipts on Bluesky.
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