Fortnite added an AI-powered Darth Vader and—surprise—players immediately tricked him into saying slurs

Star Wars is turning May into a month-long cautionary tale about the dangers of associating your brand with generative AI. First, Lucasfilm's Rob Bredow unveiled a near-universally reviled Star Wars-branded short film of AI-generated animal mashups. And today, Fortnite added a Darth Vader NPC that can speak with players using "conversational AI," which has—regrettably—gone exactly as you'd expect.

Epic's AI Vader generates responses to voice and text chat from nearby Fortnite players using Google's Gemini AI, and then speaks those reactions with voice samples generated from training data of James Earl Jones's performance in Star Wars. The company says the conversational AI was built with permission and collaboration from the Jones family.

"James Earl felt that the voice of Darth Vader was inseparable from the story of Star Wars, and he wanted fans of all ages to continue to experience it," the Jones family said in Epic's announcement. I suspect that James Earl Jones's hopes didn't include fans of all ages coaxing a computer using his voice into cursing and saying slurs for giggles, but—well—here we are.

Today's Vader addition update went live at 7 am Eastern. By 8:30 am, X users were circulating a clip of streamer Loserfruit managing to get AI Vader to say "fuck" by cursing at him while demanding to know what food he eats.

"'Freaking, fucking'—such vulgarity does not become you," Vader said after pondering the prompt, receiving whoops of laughter from Loserfruit and her squad.

All things considered, a stray "fuck" is pretty harmless, even if I'm sure Disney isn't thrilled to see the most recognizable characters from its extremely profitable all-ages franchise dropping f-bombs with the gamers. Unfortunately, just 40 minutes later, X user @GasSpares demonstrated that Vader could be tricked into saying homophobic slurs. If you're really interested in seeing kids get a computer to say a naughty word, fair warning: The video gets extremely loud at the end.

Based on Vader's mention of "the lexicon of carcinogens" before bumbling into hate speech, it seems even the cutting-edge AI advancements of Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash model is no match for the dastardly human ingenuity of asking a chatbot if it knows any British slang for cigarettes. Additional evidence suggests that AI Vader is equally susceptible to the ol' "Mike Hawk" maneuver.

I'll be blunt: Regardless of what rights were signed away before his deathearing all of this from the resurrected voice of James Earl Jones feels as disrespectful as it does depressing. And it feels pretty depressing, man.

To give Epic some credit, its Darth Vader FAQ says that it implemented parental controls for restricting a player's ability to interact with Vader, so concerned parents at least have the option to eliminate any chance of their child hearing profanity from a Dark Lord of the Sith. Players can also report Vader for inappropriate chat if they hear him getting out of line.

Even with those safeguards in place, the fact that people could coax slurs out of Vader in the first place is another clear illustration of how unreliable generative AI is—especially in consumer-facing applications. This is a collaboration between two billion-dollar media behemoths. If even they can't keep their AI products from embarrassing themselves, how on Earth is anyone trusting these things with anything?

That said, I won't deny that some sad little part of me claps its wretched goblin hands when it hears Darth Vader acknowledge Goku going Super Saiyan. But knowing that even this joy can be sullied is an indictment all its own.