Video game writers and AI: Who actually wrote that script?

The company, Saber Interactive, recently announced a game where you act as a rideshare business owner. After a former lead writer, Stella Sacco, claimed she was replaced by an AI tool midway through the project, the CEO of Saber issued a denial. He stated that the game's story was written by humans, though he admitted that one experimental mode uses AI. The reason for the AI, according to the CEO, is that the game features an infinite number of passengers, making it impossible to manually write every single interaction. Sacco argues that using AI to generate these interactions still qualifies as replacing human work, regardless of how the company labels the project.

In traditional game development, writers treat scripts like a movie or a book. They write specific lines for specific moments, and the player experiences them exactly as written. However, some games now use large language models — the same engines that power tools like ChatGPT — to create stories on the fly. Instead of a pre-written script, the game provides a prompt to the AI, such as describe a passenger who is nervous about a job interview, and the AI generates unique text based on that instruction in real-time. This allows for nearly infinite variety, as every player encounters a different version of a passenger. While this can make a world feel more unpredictable, it fundamentally changes the writer's job from crafting a final product to managing the systems that generate that product.

This conflict highlights a growing tension in the creative industries. Companies are often eager to use AI to scale up content without increasing their headcounts, viewing it as an efficiency tool. Workers, however, see this as an erosion of their craft and their career stability. The core disagreement here isn't just about whether a human wrote a specific line, but whether the act of designing the system that replaces human writing still counts as creative labor. As AI becomes more common in software development, the line between a tool that helps a creator and a tool that replaces them is becoming harder to define. It forces us to ask: do we value the infinite, generated possibilities of AI, or the hand-crafted intent of a human writer?