Future No Thanks AI Voices Removed, Refunds Offered After Backlash

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Store links: Future? No Thanks! on Steam

Future? No Thanks! cuts AI voices after a messy disclosure

Future? No Thanks! has been updated to remove AI-generated voicework, and lead developer Paolo “Molleindustria” Pedercini is offering refunds by PayPal or Venmo to players who “still feel betrayed,” according to Rock Paper Shotgun and Kotaku. The change follows Pedercini’s belated disclosure that the September-released ecosocialist satire used generative AI in a small number of places, despite his own blog describing AI as a “technofascist, anti-human and anti-art project.”

That contradiction is the center of the Future No Thanks AI voices controversy. This is an indie game built around political satire, public-good technology, and a future where society has supposedly learned from ecological and capitalist disaster. Its creator is also known for direct, left-wing games under the Molleindustria name. When players learned that the game used text-to-speech voices and other AI tools, the dispute was not only about asset provenance. It became a trust problem between an outspoken developer and an audience primed to care about labor, authorship, and transparency.

Pedercini’s new update removes the most visible AI material from the player-facing game. Rock Paper Shotgun reports that the patch takes out two text-to-speech voice instances for robot characters: an automated toilet and an automated translator in a hair salon. In an earlier disclosure covered by Rock Paper Shotgun, Pedercini said those voices amounted to about two minutes of generated voicework, made with ElevenLabs, and were meant to spoof artificial intelligence through uncanny, malfunctioning delivery.

What changed in the update

The key practical change is that the AI-generated voices are gone. Pedercini wrote, in the update quoted by Rock Paper Shotgun, that alternate voices “were recorded earlier this year” but were not originally used because he thought “the actual uncanny text-to-speech was funnier in that context.” He now says the game is “worse now, but only, like, 0.001% worse,” while acknowledging that modern text-to-speech counts as user-facing AI-generated content and keeps creating “annoyances and bad optics.”

Kotaku reports that Pedercini’s Friday follow-up clarified that the game’s AI content, aside from the code-related assistance, has been removed. That matters because his earlier disclosure was broader than the two voices. According to Kotaku, Pedercini said the game included two Suno-generated music loops in addition to the text-to-speech voices, while “a tiny fraction” of code had been debugged with ChatGPT and Claude. Rock Paper Shotgun’s earlier report also states that Pedercini said none of the game’s art or writing was AI-generated.

The update also contains a small design fix unrelated to the AI backlash. Rock Paper Shotgun reports that gigs in Future? No Thanks! now give players a bit more money, a tweak Pedercini said may prevent some situations where players could be soft-locked out of completing all quests. For a small open-world satire, that is the sort of patch note that would normally be the whole story: economy tuning, quest progression, friction removed. Instead, it lands under a much larger question about disclosure and confidence.

The trust crisis comes from the game’s own politics

Future? No Thanks! is described by Rock Paper Shotgun as an open-world ecosatire and by Kotaku as an adventure game about an out-of-place older man trying to finish his bucket list before assisted suicide in a future where climate change is being addressed, democracy thrives, and technology serves the public good. Kotaku also notes that Pedercini presented the project as developed with “locally sourced talent and minimal involvement from capitalists, marketers, or profiteers.”

That positioning raised the temperature of the backlash. Pedercini did not merely use AI tools and then apologize in neutral corporate language. In the disclosure post covered by Rock Paper Shotgun, he opened by praising festival and showcase AI disclosure requirements, called “slop and vibe-coded games” a scourge, and wrote that AI is a “technofascist, anti-human and anti-art project.” He then explained that Future? No Thanks! could not be called “100% AI free.”

For players who bought into the game’s values, the issue is less about whether an automated toilet sounded better with artificial speech. It is about whether a politically explicit indie game can ask for trust while revealing after release that some content came from tools many artists and actors see as a labor threat. Kotaku frames the tension sharply, pointing to Pedercini’s history of political browser games and arguing that the use of AI tools sits awkwardly beside a socialist, eco-friendly world. That is opinion from Kotaku, but it tracks with the backlash Pedercini himself describes on social media and in his follow-up post.

Pedercini’s defense, and where it did not land

Pedercini’s defense rests on intent, scale, and context. In the earlier blog post covered by Rock Paper Shotgun, he argued that Future? No Thanks! satirizes generative AI and careless technology, while also depicting beneficial uses such as planned-economy coordination, voice recognition, and talking robots. For the voice scenes, he said the humor depended on uncanny voices doing their jobs poorly, and that human voice attempts for those roles “just weren’t working as well.”

He also separated AI-generated assets from coding assistance. Rock Paper Shotgun reports that Pedercini said 99 percent of the code base was written before AI was viable as a coding tool, and that ChatGPT or Claude were used late in development for finishing touches and minor debugging, including fixing a shader he did not write and diagnosing a one-frame loading glitch. He also said AI-assisted code is difficult to remove once introduced because he would not be able to tell which lines he wrote, which were generated, and which were somewhere between.

The problem is that a technically limited explanation does not automatically repair a values-based breach. Rock Paper Shotgun quotes Pedercini’s follow-up as saying someone on Bluesky “dragged” him over a disclosure he had thought was minor, and he admitted that a paragraph in the original post sounded like he was trying to exculpate himself by criticizing colleagues who advocate for an AI-free life. Kotaku describes the refund offer as buried in an overly sarcastic post. Those tonal choices matter because this is an indie game AI backlash where the audience is reading the apology for respect as much as for facts.

How Future No Thanks refunds work, based on the confirmed offer

The confirmed refund offer is direct and limited in the details currently available from the cited reports. Rock Paper Shotgun and Kotaku both report that Pedercini is offering refunds over PayPal or Venmo to people who bought Future? No Thanks! and “still feel betrayed.” The supplied source material does not include a deadline, a dedicated refund form, eligibility window, or instructions for players who cannot use PayPal or Venmo.

That means players looking for Future No Thanks refunds should treat the offer as a developer-handled process, not as a confirmed storefront-wide program. The reports identify PayPal and Venmo as the named payment methods. They do not state that Steam has changed its refund rules for this case, nor do they provide evidence of an automatic refund path through the Steam client. The safest practical step is to read Pedercini’s update post on the Molleindustria site and use the contact or instructions he provides there, while keeping proof of purchase ready in case he requests it.

There is also a buyer guidance point for anyone who has not purchased yet. According to Rock Paper Shotgun, the game’s Steam page did not have a generative AI disclosure when the game first released after a delay over Valve concerns about sexual material, but it has one now. Players who avoid AI-generated content entirely should check the current store disclosure and Pedercini’s posts before buying, especially because the game still has code that Pedercini says was assisted by AI during debugging and cannot be cleanly separated after the fact.

Steam disclosure rules leave awkward gaps for small games

The Future? No Thanks! dispute is also a reminder that store disclosures are not the same as a shared ethical standard. Rock Paper Shotgun notes that Valve updated Steam’s rules in January to more explicitly allow AI-powered “efficiency” tools such as coding assistants. In Pedercini’s own account, Steam does not require disclosure for generative AI uses such as code assistance, which leads some players to assume games without store-page AI disclosures are AI-free.

Rock Paper Shotgun adds, while making clear it is relying on anecdotes and developer conversations rather than a statistical survey, that many Steam developers likely are not disclosing all generative AI use. The outlet characterizes Steam’s policy as closer to a gesture than a mechanism of accountability. That assessment is not a formal finding, but it captures the uncertainty players now face: one game may disclose tool use in detail after launch, while another may remain silent because the platform does not require disclosure for the same category of assistance.

For indies, the incentives are tangled. Small teams often fight brittle engines, outdated forum answers, broken shaders, and late-production bugs without the buffer of a large technical staff. At the same time, small games often sell themselves through craft, personality, and a closer relationship between creator and audience. Future? No Thanks! shows how quickly that intimacy can curdle when the disclosure arrives late, even if the developer says the actual AI footprint was tiny.

A small patch with a larger lesson about craft

As a game object, the change sounds tiny: two robot voices removed, replacement recordings used, a couple of money payouts adjusted. As a trust event, it is much larger. The AI generated voices game controversy around Future? No Thanks! grew because the game’s satire, its creator’s politics, and its production choices all collided in public after release.

There are still unresolved details. The cited reports do not provide a full refund procedure beyond PayPal and Venmo. They do not show how many players requested refunds, whether the Suno loops were replaced with newly composed music or simply removed, or whether Pedercini will revise the game’s Steam disclosure again after the update. What is confirmed is that the player-facing AI voices have been removed, refunds are being offered directly to players who feel betrayed, and Pedercini has said his next game will be entirely hand-coded, according to Kotaku.

For players, the practical read is simple. If you already own Future? No Thanks! and the AI use changes your relationship to the purchase, check the Molleindustria update for the refund route and note that PayPal and Venmo are the confirmed methods reported. If you are considering buying it, read the current Steam disclosure first. And if you are watching the indie scene, this is one more sign that disclosure timing has become part of the craft. In small games, the work is the mechanics, the jokes, the voices, the bugs fixed at midnight, and the trust that lets players believe in the world those pieces create.