A few weeks ago, when I spoke with Tim Willits, chief creative officer at Saber Interactive, makers of games like Space Marine 2, SnowRunner, and World War Z, the company was dealing with the shitstorm that ensued from their announcement of Rideshare Stimulator.
The game's basically an Uber simulator, with you driving a car around town picking up fares, but Saber drew all kinds of bad attention when a former writer on the game revealed the game featured generative AI (something left undisclosed on the game's Steam page until recently) and CEO Matt Karch responded by attacking the writer in statements to the press. Something he has since apologised for.
So, naturally, we talked about generative AI and the reputational damage – or lack of – when getting caught out using it.
Rideshare will have a main narrative, similar to other simulator games, in which you start your business in a city and grow it up as you complete jobs. Similar to something you would play through in Snowrunner. "All that is written by humans, all the missions are written by humans," Willits tells me. Where the generative AI appears is in Rideshare's Free Ride mode.
In Free Ride, when you pick up a fare, their dialogue will be generated using an LLM. "What we want to do is feed current events, like maybe there's some soccer game, and some ride will get in and talk about it," Willits explains. He says Saber are "using it here in a small part of a small game to test the waters." and that the company are "interested in how AI can help in games."
Willits says Rideshare is the only game in which Saber are using generative AI – "We don't have AI in Space Marine. We don't have AI in Hellraiser. We don't have AI in Jurassic Park, but we want to figure it out and we want to try something."
When I spoke with Willits, the thing I most wanted to know was why there was no AI disclosure on the Rideshare's Steam page when it was first revealed. Valve have a clear policy on disclosing the use of generative AI both in the production of a game and if any feature of the game makes ongoing calls to LLMs.
The reason, Willits says, is they "had an announce plan, but that got a little sideways". There was going to be a sneak peak, then there would have been reveals of the game's features in the future, and as part of that the generative technology would have been revealed. To indicate how early in the game's reveal rollout they are, Willits points out Rideshare's "not here" at Gamescom. "Unfortunately, we had some people talk about the game when they weren't supposed to be talking about the game and that just kind of escalated."
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/tim-willits-doesnt-think-rideshares-generative-ai-is-damaging-sabers-reputation
