Paolo Pedercini, the developer behind Molleindustria, responded to criticism of generative AI in Future? No Thanks! with a mix of changes and pushback. He replaced two text-to-speech character voices and offered refunds to players who felt misled, but continued to defend his limited use of AI and the original voices’ role in the satire.
7
12
What Pedercini disclosed about AI use
In an October 17 post, Pedercini described AI as “a technofascist, anti-human and anti-art project” while acknowledging that Future? No Thanks! was not entirely AI-free. He said about 99% of the game’s code had been written before AI was viable as a coding tool, and that he used ChatGPT or Claude to assist with a tiny fraction of the code late in development—not to generate the game wholesale.
4
11
Reporting described the coding assistance as finishing and debugging work, including help with a shader that had broken after an update.
40 Pedercini’s disclosure also said the game’s first released version included two brief text-to-speech voices: one for an automated toilet and another for a hair-salon translator.
4
He replaced the voices, but said they worked as satire
In an October 23 update, Pedercini replaced both synthetic voices with a human pretending to be a robot. He said the human performances had been recorded earlier in the year, but he had chosen the uncanny text-to-speech versions because he found them funnier in context.
7
The update addressed the visible AI-generated voices, not every instance of AI assistance in the game. Pedercini characterized the change as giving players a version without AI-generated voices; his original disclosure still described a small amount of AI-supported code.
4
7
Refunds and a hand-coded next project
Pedercini offered to refund buyers who still felt “betrayed,” asking them to contact him with PayPal or Venmo details.
7
12 He also said his next project would be completely hand-coded.
3
14
The response therefore stopped short of a wholesale retraction of his earlier position. He made a concrete concession by replacing the voices and offering refunds, while maintaining that the original synthetic performances served the game’s satire. In reporting on the update, he was quoted as saying the game was “0.001% worse” without them.
1