Future? No Thanks! dev removes AI-generated voices from game and offers refunds to players who feel "betrayed"

Open world ecosatire Future? No Thanks! has been updated to remove some AI-generated voices, after lead developer Paolo "Molleindustria" Pedercini belatedly disclosed his usage of the technology earlier this week. He's also offering to refund people over Paypal or Venmo if they "still feel betrayed" by this.

The update removes two instances of text-to-speech generated voicework for in-game robot characters – an automated toilet and an automated translator in a hair salon. In his previous blog, Pedercini wrote that he used genAI for these characters as a spoof of generative AI. He's decided to remove them following a number of angry reactions on social media and some coverage in the press.

"The voices were recorded earlier this year but I decided to not use them because I thought the actual uncanny text-to-speech was funnier in that context," Pedercini writes in a new blog post. "Alas, the new generation of text-to-speech counts as user-facing AI-generated content and that keeps creating all sorts of annoyances and bad optics."

Pedercini still thinks the text-to-speech voices belong in Future? No Thanks! "In my opinion the game is worse now, but only, like, 0.001% worse," he observes. In less acrimonious tidings, he's also tweaked the game so that the "various gigs give you a bit more money, possibly preventing some situations of soft-locking players from achieving all the quests."

The blog includes a "personal update" in which Pedercini expounds rather bitterly upon the backlash to the game's genAI elements. "Somebody from Bluesky (the Twitter/X clone) dragged me due to a post disclosing what I foolishly thought a minor use of generative-AI in Future? No Thanks!" he writes. "I gave versions of that statement multiple times before, whenever asked by festivals and events. Steam doesn’t require disclosure of generative AI for things like code assistance so many people assume their favorite indie games don’t use AI at all just because the developers stay mum."

For context, Valve updated Steam's rules in January to allow "efficiency" tools, such as coding assistants. I'm basing this on anecdotes and conversations with other devs, rather than any kind of statistical survey, but it seems very likely that a lot of developers on Steam aren't disclosing their genAI use - the policy has always been more of a gesture on Valve's part than a mechanism of real accountability.

"Not me, I’m a good boy and I wanted a page I could link to that explains that NO, this is not a vibecoded slop game but YES, I did ask chatGPT to fix a broken shader and a few things like that," Pedercini goes on. "More foolishly, I added a paragraph that sounded like I was trying to exculpate myself by poo-pooing on all the colleagues that advocate for an AI-free life." (The paragraph in collection was deleted after the original blog's publication, but not before it had been screengrabbed and shared on the socials.)

"Look, it was not a good post," Pedercini concedes. "Defeatist, hastily written. I thought nobody would read it. Anyway, slow news day, everybody fucking hates AI, the whole scene piled on."

Pedercini proceeds to caricature some of the people yelling at him over social media: "Am I satirizing the puppy killing machine by KILLING PUPPIES?" He compares the anger he's received to being harrassed by Adam Baldwin's followers at the height of the Gamergate hate campaign.

Pedercini ends by sharing a list of developers who've sworn off generative AI. "Big props to them," he writes. "Give them a follow. SteamFest is drowning in actual slop, help them stand out. And I hate to break it to you, but you should probably assume that all the studios that have not made a public statement against all generative AI are using it for coding in some capacity. I’m guessing this episode isn’t going to encourage more voluntary disclosures." As for his next game, it'll be "completely hand-coded".