Papers, Please, Return of the Obra Dinn dev Lucas Pope won’t talk about current game in case it “gets slurped up by AI”

Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn developer Lucas Pope is reluctant to talk about his current game for fear it’ll “get slurped up by AI.”

Talking to No More Robots co-founder Mike Rose and Vlambeer co-founder Rami Ismail on the Mike & Rami Are Still Here podcast, Pope admitted that he was reluctant to say too much in case the central conceit was copied elsewhere.

“But I also like to talk about the stuff I’m working on, and I think, just now, the situation just feels different to me,” Pope said, as transcribed by IGN.

“You don’t really talk about stuff when you’re working on it, because I don’t know that it’s going to get slurped up by AI or people are going to copy it, or something else like that.

“It’s not a hard rule,” he added. “It’s just I got a feeling about that. And I just didn’t feel as comfortable talking about the stuff I was working on again. So I hope that sort of breaks, and I can feel comfortable talking about the stuff I’m working on.”

AI continues to be a contentious topic among developers and players alike. Just last week, a translator formerly employed by Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 studio Warhorse Studios claimed he had been “fired and replaced with AI.”