Saber Interactive: Former Writer Accuses Studio of Replacing Her With ChatGPT

Stella Sacco, Saber Interactive's former lead writer, posted on Bluesky that she was replaced by ChatGPT while working on Rideshare "Stimulator," the studio's new taxi-driving game. Saber denied it. Then the company's CEO, Matt Karch, put out a statement accusing her of violating a confidentiality agreement, while still maintaining that nobody had been replaced by AI. It's hard to imagine a more contradictory message coming from one company in one day.

Two versions of the same story

Sacco says her role on Rideshare "Stimulator" ended once AI started generating the passenger dialogue she and her team used to write. Saber Interactive answered with an official statement: no writer was replaced by AI, on this game or any other. The studio added that Rideshare's story was written entirely by real people, and that its writing staff has tripled since 2023, meant to show the human role in that department growing, not shrinking.

The game does include an experimental mode using generative AI, justified by the studio in a characteristic way: the number of passengers in the game is infinite, so there's no way to hand-write a separate story for every single one. That's a reasonable-sounding argument in isolation, except it doesn't actually address what Sacco accused the company of: the question isn't whether AI generates content for mass, repeatable passengers, it's whether it replaced one specific person in one specific role.

A statement that made it worse

Instead of sticking to one consistent line of defense, CEO Matt Karch issued a separate, combative statement aimed directly at Sacco, accusing her of breaching a confidentiality agreement by the mere act of speaking publicly about the terms of her departure. That move escalates the dispute rather than defusing it: instead of one calm denial from the studio, there's now also a personal attack from the person at the top of the company, aimed at a former employee who had already told her side of the story publicly anyway.

From a PR standpoint, it's a self-inflicted mistake. A denial of the AI-replacement claim could have stayed one calm, factual paragraph. Threatening a former employee over an NDA for talking about her own experience, on top of that after she'd already gone public, just confirms exactly the kind of corporate behavior game industry workers have complained about for years: stay quiet, or get punished for telling the truth.

What Rideshare "Stimulator" actually is

The game was only announced in late July 2026, a joint project between Saber Interactive and developer UNIGINE, for PS5, Xbox Series, and PC. The pitch is simple: you run your own rideshare business in the fictional city of Ottoberg, driving random passengers, each with a short story of their own, sometimes captivating, sometimes funny, sometimes just weird. The format implies dozens, maybe hundreds of these micro-stories, which itself explains why the studio reached for generative AI at all, hand-writing a distinct script for every random passenger at that scale simply isn't feasible on a sane budget.

The problem is that this justification, even if sincere, doesn't answer Sacco's specific claim. She isn't talking about mass-generated passengers, she's talking about her role as lead writer, the person responsible for the tone, structure, and quality of the whole thing, not individual lines for random NPC number 4,000.

Why this particular timing stings more

This dispute lands at a moment when the games industry is unusually sensitive about generative AI in creative production. It's not just about job losses, it's that studios routinely reassure players a given game is "written by humans" while quietly deploying tools that meaningfully change how much human work sits behind the finished product. When one former employee says something different from the studio's official line in public, players and journalists have no clean way to verify which version is closer to the truth beyond just picking a side to believe.

Rideshare "Stimulator" was supposed to be a light, absurd game about driving a taxi around a city full of strange passengers and their stories. Instead of pre-launch coverage about the game itself, it's now generating a dispute over who actually wrote it, before the game has even shipped. For the studio, that's about the worst possible way to build hype ahead of launch, a controversy it escalated with its own statement.