The open-world ecosocialist satire Future? No Thanks! has been patched to remove its AI-generated voices, and its creator is offering money back to anyone still upset. Paolo Pedercini, who makes games as Molleindustria, laid out the changes and the refund offer in a blog post on Oct. 23.
The update replaces two brief text-to-speech performances: an automated toilet and an automatic translator in a hair salon. Both are now voiced by a human pretending to be a robot. The patch also makes in-game gigs pay a bit more, which Pedercini says should keep some players from getting soft-locked out of finishing every quest.
Pedercini says the human recordings were made earlier this year, but he originally kept the synthetic voices because he thought “the actual uncanny text-to-speech was funnier in that context.” He changed course after the voices kept “creating all sorts of annoyances and bad optics.” His verdict on the result: “In my opinion the game is worse now, but only, like, 0.001% worse.”
The change follows a rough week. Pedercini had posted a disclosure explaining that no art, writing or sound in the game was AI-generated, but that he had used chatbots for a small amount of late-stage coding help and that the two robot voices used text-to-speech. A paragraph in that post that he says came across as knocking colleagues who advocate for an AI-free life drew a wave of criticism on Bluesky, and he now calls the post “defeatist” and “hastily written.”
His offer to players is direct. “If you bought Future? No Thanks! (I know you didn’t) and still feel betrayed, please email me your Paypal or Venmo and I’ll send your money back,” he wrote. He also shared a list of developers who reject generative AI entirely, and said his next project “will be completely hand-coded.”
Future? No Thanks! launched Oct. 17 on Steam and Itch.io for Windows and Mac, self-published after years of development. The fight over AI use in games has been loud all month, from studios pulling demos to Epic, which walked back an AI requirement for its Unreal AI MegaJam. Pedercini points out that Steam does not require developers to disclose AI help with things like code, so many players assume their favorite indie games use none at all. He also warned that “this episode isn’t going to encourage more voluntary disclosures.”
