#391: Saber rattling

There are a few things we need to bear in mind when talking about rich people in the 2020s. The first is that the pandemic absolutely, dreadfully, permanently broke their brains. Suddenly absent their usual coterie of lickspittles and nodding dogs — laughing at their awful jokes, praising their dreadful ideas, following to heel as if twenty million dollars was going to fall out of the boss-god’s pockets any second now and be bequeathed to the closest and most servile dogsbody — they were forced, firstly, to reckon with their own thoughts and the bland horrors they no doubt contained, and secondly to look on as the world’s love, attention and acclaim shifted away from the rich guys to society’s true value creators. Suddenly these people were applauding on their doorsteps for healthcare staff; they were thanking their delivery drivers, striking up willing conversations with the guys that came to empty the bins. Something broke inside the rich at the sight of this, and at some point, as the pendulum of work/life balance swung violently away from their kingdoms, as people began to realise a job was just a job and there were more important things to our short and seemingly shortening time on this planet, their worlds were turned upside down, and they checked out of reality for good.

They turned, in one way or another, to the internet, where the attention they so craved existed in abundance. Some schemed in group chats, set up by even richer men with demonstrably bigger rich-guy ideas, with the specific purpose of radicalising them. Others simply started posting, guffing and blathering their bile and nonsense to the platforms their wealth and profile innately granted them. When it came along they all turned eagerly to AI, where they found an acolyte more willing and fawning than any human, doing all their ‘working’ and ‘thinking’ for them until their brains finally collapsed for good. Over time the group chats grew more radical, the public conversation steadily more hateful and insane, and nothing ever came of any of it. Aided by a government dragging its people by the hair and teeth into a post-truth world, they eventually realised you could say anything. Anything you liked, at all, and nothing would ever come of it.

Anyway! To videogames. Saber Interactive announced a new thing this week. Called Rideshare “Stimulator”, it is an even less appealing prospect than its simply hateful quotemarks, which Hit Points will not be using again — honestly lads you can put all the mad stylistic bullshit you like in your game titles, your square brackets and camel cases etc, I am not using them — in its title suggest. It’s a game about running a rideshare business that would stink of generative AI even if its former lead writer hadn’t immediately taken to BlueSky to accuse Saber of flouting Steam’s disclosure rules. “I was lead writer on this one,” said writer, the exquisitely named Stella Sacco, said. “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.”

Juicy stuff! The game certainly reeks of AI nonsense, from the gurning fizzogs in its keyart to the suspicious Oxford comma in its Steam blurb, but Saber was having none of it. “Neither Saber nor [developer] Unigine have replaced any writers with AI for Rideshare or any other game,” a PR rep well-actually-ed in a statement to PC Gamer. “In fact, Saber’s staff of writers has tripled since 2023. Rideshare’s story was written entirely by real people.” The statement went on to acknowledge that while the game does indeed use AI to power a free-ride mode that boasts an infinite number of passengers, “none of our 3000+ employees have to worry about being replaced by AI.”

Sacco was having none of it. “It was my job to write the game,” she told PC Gamer, “and then it wasn’t once [Saber CEO] Matt Karch decided using ChatGPT would be great publicity.” In a social follow-up, she added: “My boss, to his credit, argued over and over with the C-level who pushed the AI [...] but the suit insisted ‘gamers love new tech’ so using AI would be ‘great marketing'.” Mmm. I mean, I suppose more people found out about Rideshare Stimulator this week than would’ve were it not for its use of AI, and the fallout it has subsequently sparked. But... ‘good’ marketing? Not convinced.

This sort of he-said, she-said stuff is either good fun or rather distasteful, depending on your point of view. But if Saber CEO Matthew Karch was surrounded by smart people to whom he was actually prepared to listen, I’m sure he’d have been told that this sort of thing is best ignored. The news cycle moves fast these days; keep your head down for a day or two and the baying mob will have found something else to be cross about. But Karch is a rich guy, and so either isn’t surrounded by those people, or doesn’t believe he has to listen to them. Our chums at This Week In Videogames requested a follow-up statement from Saber, and hoo boy, did they ever get one. Over to you, Matthew! Go off, king!

“Stella who? I had to ask Claude because I have never spoken to her or seen her. We have already said we are using AI for certain parts of the game and will update the Steam page once we have finali[s]ed the feature set.

“Let me clarify that the entire story script, were it to win an award, would go to someone who can walk up on stage and receive it. It was always our intention to reveal this until Stella violated her confidentiality clause and revealed this before we were ready. We look at our use of AI in this particular game, which will be a lower-priced title, as a plus for consumers.

“As far as Stella is concerned, she was replaced by someone more talented and terminated for a variety of reasons a few months later. From what I can gather she enjoys controversy even more than I do. I would frankly in retrospect have been happy to replace her with AI. At least we would be dealing with someone programmed to be honest.”

Holy fucking shit! We have our fair share of rich asshole idiots in games, and while Karch may not be the richest he has just catapulted himself into the upper echelons of the other two leaderboards. Which is a pretty good return, honestly, from a single, 100-word statement parped out by an AI he has trained, over the last however many months or years, to be the biggest and most servile champion he has ever had.

Needless to say he has absolutely fucked it here. He’s admitted to wilfully violating Steam’s AI disclosure rules. He’s accused someone of violating a nondisclosure agreement by revealing something he says isn’t true. He's revealed that he is comfortable referring, in a public setting, to a large language model as "someone". And of course he has given this story an enormous push, keeping Saber’s name in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, for far longer than it would have been if he’d just shut his stupid face instead.

Alas, shutting up simply isn’t in these guys’ DNA. They say and post and send whatever they feel like, knowing from the merest glance at the headlines that consequences are for the little people, not for big strong boys like them. They’re probably right, too. Steam might have a quiet word about Saber not disclosing Rideshare’s use of AI, but that’ll be the limit of it. My inner optimist hopes that Games Workshop, owner of the Warhammer IP that birthed Saber’s well-regarded Space Marine 2, might look at this tawdry episode and think, hang on a sec. That it might point at the stringent anti-AI policy it operates, decide Saber isn’t the sort of company it wants to do business with, and tell Karch to sling his hook. It sure would be nice to get some good news one day, wouldn’t it. That, like so many other things, seems increasingly to belong only to the rich.