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?

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