So, Saturday morning rolls around, and the birds are chirping like they haven’t got a care in the world. Lucky bastards. Me, I’m staring into the bottom of a coffee cup that’s seen better days, trying to make sense of the digital ink spilled across my screen. The coffee’s not hitting the spot. Might need to chase it with something stronger before noon, just to clear the cobwebs and the lingering taste of last night’s cheap whiskey. And what’s the news that’s got my temples throbbing? Darth-goddamn-Vader is cussing up a storm in Fortnite.
Yeah, you heard that right. Epic Games, those bright sparks who keep finding new ways to separate kids from their parents’ money, decided it was a brilliant idea to let players chat with an AI version of the galaxy’s baddest dad. “Ask him all your pressing questions about the Force, the Galactic Empire … or you know, a good strat for the last Storm circle,” they chirped in their announcement. Sweet Jesus. Did they really think little Timmy and Suzie were going to ask about optimal lightsaber stances? The naivety is almost charming, if it wasn’t so damn predictable.
Of course, mere hours after this digital Sith Lord manifested, the internet did what the internet does best: it poked the bear until it shat itself. Streamers, bless their corrupt little hearts, were gleefully posting clips of Vader losing his Imperial cool. One of them, a dame calling herself Loserfruit, gets him to drop a “freaking fucking.” Vader, bless his cotton socks, even tries to play it cool: “Freaking? Fucking? Such vulgarity does not become you.” Oh, the irony. It’s richer than a double bourbon on a lonely Tuesday night.
Then, the same streamer steers him into a conversation about romance, and Vader, the poor, confused algorithm, starts talking about “breasts” and “armored chestplates.” You can’t make this shit up. Or, well, apparently you can if you’re a sufficiently motivated gamer with too much time on your hands. Another genius got him to babble about carcinogens before dropping a slur that, depending on where you’re from, either refers to a cigarette or something you really shouldn’t call another human being. The streamer screamed like he’d just won the lottery. And in a way, I guess he had. He’d exposed the whole damn charade for what it was.
Epic Games, naturally, went into damage control mode. A spokesperson, one Cat McCormack, told WIRED they pushed a hotfix “within 30 minutes of this happening in-game, so this shouldn’t happen again.” Thirty minutes! Imagine the panic. Phones ringing off the hook, coders frantically typing, probably spilling lukewarm coffee all over their expensive keyboards. “This shouldn’t happen again.” Famous last words in the world of ones and zeroes, sweetheart. It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a severed artery.
They claim their filters “did not catch a specific variation of an expletive.” A specific variation. That’s corporate speak for “we didn’t think kids were clever enough to type f-*-c-k-i-n-g with a space in between, or whatever damn trick they used.” It’s always the same story. These companies spend millions, probably billions, on these AI toys, these “Google Gemini 2.0” marvels with voices cloned from dead actors like James Earl Jones using “ElevenLabs’ Flash v2.5” – sounds like a brand of cheap gin, doesn’t it? They layer on Google’s safety settings, then their own “instructions” and “guardrails.” And what happens? The whole damn thing falls apart the second it meets actual, chaotic, gloriously messy humanity.
They even have “parental controls specific to AI use in-game.” Parental controls! For Darth Vader! What’s next, a trigger warning before he Force-chokes someone? The absurdity of it all is enough to make a man reach for the bottle before breakfast. If a player keeps trying to make Vader say naughty words, he’ll leave their squad. Oh, the horror! The AI gets offended and takes its ball and goes home. “These safety settings and restrictions have been rigorously tested by a combination of Epic employees and outside experts,” McCormack says. Rigorously tested. I bet they were. Probably tested by a roomful of guys in sensible shoes who wouldn’t know a good swear word if it bit them on their ass. They didn’t test it against the gleeful anarchy of a bored teenager. That’s your real stress test, folks.
The truth is, these “guardrails” are about as effective as a screen door on a star destroyer. You can program all the “don’t say this” and “don’t say that” you want, but human ingenuity, especially when it comes to being a pain in the ass, will always find a way. It’s the digital equivalent of drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa. It’s primal.
And it gets better, or worse, depending on how much faith you have left in this species. Some of the stuff Vader spouted was more subtle, the kind of insidious poison that an AI, bless its algorithmic heart, probably wouldn’t even recognize as problematic. Dismissing Spanish as “a useful tongue for smugglers and spice traders. Its strategic value is minimal.” Or giving a “tier list” of the colors white, brown, and yellow. See, the AI isn’t just learning to swear; it’s learning to be a casually bigoted asshole, just like its creators. It’s reflecting the garbage it’s fed, the patterns it detects in the endless ocean of text and data it swims in. It’s a mirror, and right now, the reflection ain’t pretty. Makes a man want to light up another cigarette, just to watch something burn cleanly for a change.
Lucasfilm, the keepers of the Vader flame, apparently had no comment. Smart move. Probably hiding under their desks, hoping the whole thing blows over. Can’t blame them. What are they gonna say? “Yeah, our iconic villain, the embodiment of cosmic evil, has been reduced to a malfunctioning chatbot spouting gamer slang and accidental racism. Our bad.”
Epic, meanwhile, trotted out the usual lines: “We will investigate reports and, if needed, make adjustments to avoid similar responses in the future.” Adjustments. More tweaks to the code, more filters, more desperate attempts to put the genie back in the bottle after it’s already granted a bunch of really stupid wishes. They say Fortnite is a “digital playground for millions of players, many of them young.” No shit, Sherlock. And what do kids do in a playground? They test boundaries. They see how high they can swing before they fall off and break something. They try to get the scary masked man to say “fuck.” It’s human nature. Or maybe just kid nature. Same difference, most days.
The article rightly points out that “the speed at which players were able to do so suggests that generative AI still isn’t fully ready to be unleashed on a major game platform.” You think? It’s like giving a chimpanzee a loaded shotgun and being surprised when it starts blasting holes in the ceiling. These AI models are powerful, sure, but they’re also incredibly dumb in a way that’s hard to explain to people who think “artificial intelligence” means there’s an actual intelligence in there. It’s just pattern matching, on a colossal scale. And the patterns it’s matching? Well, they come from us. All our biases, our stupidities, our love for a good dirty joke.
It’s funny, in a bleak, end-of-the-world kind of way. The corporations want AI to be this clean, efficient, helpful tool. They want it to write their marketing copy, answer customer service calls, maybe even design their next billion-dollar product. But they also want it to be safe. Harmless. Neutered. And the two things just don’t go together, not when the AI is learning from the messy, chaotic, often offensive world we’ve actually created.
This whole Vader fiasco is just a symptom of a larger disease. The desperate rush to cram AI into everything, whether it makes sense or not. The belief that more code, more data, more processing power can somehow solve fundamentally human problems. Or, in this case, replicate a beloved character without him immediately turning into a digital delinquent. They want the idea of Darth Vader – the cool voice, the imposing presence, the brand recognition. But they don’t want the baggage that comes with trying to simulate a personality, especially one that’s supposed to be, you know, evil. An evil that’s still somehow G-rated. It’s a contradiction in terms.
And just to add another layer of farce to this whole circus, on the very same day, Epic announced that Apple, their arch-nemesis, had blocked Fortnite from the App Store again. These two giants, squabbling over percentages and control like a couple of drunks fighting over the last olive in the jar. Billions of dollars at stake, and it all boils down to who gets to dip their beak a little deeper into the trough. It’s a sideshow, but it’s a telling one. While they’re busy wrestling in the mud, their AI creations are busy learning new and exciting ways to embarrass them.
Epic unveiled their new Vader boss with the message: “This will be a day long remembered.” Oh, it’ll be remembered, alright. Not as a triumph of interactive entertainment, but as the day Darth Vader got punked by a bunch of kids and reminded everyone that even the Dark Side has to watch its language online. It’s a perfect metaphor for the whole damn enterprise. All this advanced technology, all these grand ambitions, and it still gets tripped up by the oldest trick in the book: the human capacity for mischief.
You build a perfect, sterile, AI-driven utopia, and someone will immediately try to teach the robots to tell fart jokes. It’s inevitable. It’s glorious. It’s what makes us human, I suppose. That, and the ability to appreciate a good stiff drink when the world goes completely off the rails. These tech wizards, they talk about “alignment” and “safety protocols.” Me, I think they just need to spend more time in dive bars. They’d learn a hell of a lot more about human nature than they ever will from their datasets. They’d learn that people are unpredictable, often vulgar, and usually more interested in a good laugh than in “optimized user experiences.”
They want AI to be a god, or at least a very obedient servant. But right now, it’s more like a toddler with a megaphone, repeating all the naughty words it’s overheard. And the parents are running around, flustered, trying to shush it before it says something really bad. It’s a comedy, folks. A dark one, sure, but a comedy nonetheless.
Pour myself another. This one’s to the kids, the little anarchists. They’re doing the Lord’s work, in their own twisted way. Showing the emperors of code that they’re not wearing any clothes, just a very expensive, very glitchy digital costume.
The future’s here, alright. It’s just dumber and more profane than we expected. And frankly, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Keeps things interesting. Now, if you’ll excuse me, this bottle ain’t gonna empty itself, and the void is staring back with an unusual intensity this morning.
Chinaski, out. Or at least, passed out. We’ll see how the next hour pans out.
Source: ‘Fortnite’ Players Are Already Making AI Darth Vader Swear