Fortnite Turns To The Dark Side With AI Darth Vader Voice, And Of Course It’s Been Swearing

Update [Fri 16th May 2025, 7:28pm]:

In case you needed any more convincing that this is pretty bad and disrespectful, PC Gamer has done some additional research and has discovered that, not only have people been “teaching” the AI chatbot to swear, but also how to use slurs. Of course.

We’re not going to link to the social media posts here given the language used in the footage, but as Lincoln Carpenter reports, X user @GasSpares has shared a clip of a person getting Darth Vader to use homophobic language.

The official Fortnite account has responded to the clip saying that the character “was replying to the player’s prompt around ‘carcinogens’ in this context” and that the team has “hotfixed” the issue. But the AI chatbot is still in the game.

Kotaku reporter Ethan Gach has also been told by Fornite’s dev team that “We pushed a hot fix within 30 minutes of this happening in-game, so this shouldn’t happen again.”

Original Story: Here’s a statement that gets worse the longer you read it: Fortnite‘s new Star Wars season has gained a Darth Vader NPC that can talk to you in the voice of the late, great James Earl Jones via a generative AI chatbot. Forget Imperial Admiral Motti’s lack of faith, we find this disturbing (thanks for the heads up, Eurogamer).

If an AI chatbot thrown into the middle of a game as popular with children as Fortnite sounds like a recipe for disaster, that’s because it probably is. Despite only existing in Epic’s infamous battler for a matter of hours, players have already caught the Sith Lord making all kinds of questionable statements like calling Twitch streamer Loserfruit a “thug” and dropping the F-bomb — yep, language warning for the embedded tweet below.

As reported by Kotaku’s Ethan Gach, Epic has since issued a hot fix to stop Darth from uttering such filth again… for now, at least.

Epic has teamed up with Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash model and ElevenLabs’ Flash v2.5 model to make the conversations happen, and has even secured the rights to use James Earl Jones’ voice (which the actor signed over to Disney in 2022) to ensure Vader sounds like Vader — at least, like a generative AI take on Vader.

“James Earl felt that the voice of Darth Vader was inseparable from the story of Star Wars, and he always wanted fans of all ages to continue to experience it,” the Jones family said in a statement on the Epic Games website, “We hope that this collaboration with Fortnite will allow both longtime fans of Darth Vader and newer generations to share in the enjoyment of this iconic character”.

Only players over 13 years old will be able to talk to Vader without first getting parental permission, and Epic has specified that it will “not use any of your interactions with Darth Vader to train AI models”. Anything you say to the Artist Formally Known As Anakin Skywalker will be sent “securely” to Gemini, Epic continues, and “Your voice audio and transcriptions of it are not stored”.

Sure, it’s just a bit of fun, but the whole thing makes us feel a bit icky, particularly given the current discussions surrounding the encroachment of AI on the lives of very real voice actors. Hey, we guess this kind of tech is much like sand: coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere.

What do you make of this new, chatty Vader? Take the high ground in the comments and let us know.