UPDATE 4.45pm UK: Well, that didn’t take long. Kotaku report Ethan Gach has reported that Epic Games has issued a swift update after players quickly got Darth Vader to start swearing.
“We pushed a hot fix within 30 minutes of this happening in-game,” Epic said, “so this shouldn’t happen again.”
ORIGINAL STORY 4.15pm UK: Fortnite now lets you chat with Darth Vader, who wields the fully operational AI-generated power of the late James Earl Jones.
This isn’t the first time Fortnite has featured the digital recreation of a now-deceased individual. Last year, it held a pop concert fronted by Juice Wrld, the young rapper and Fortnite fan who sadly died of an overdose in 2019.
But this is the first time Fortnite has let you voice chat with a character – any character, living or dead – and have them respond to you via generative AI. Here’s a look at how it works:
Darth Vader just did a background check on NickEh30 in Fortnite 😭 pic.twitter.com/PYNA5uP6FA
— T5G (@Top5Gamingx) May 16, 2025
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And of course, people are already doing terrible things with it, such as getting Vader to say swears. Here’s Epic Games’ closely allied streamer LoserFruit, who has a skin in the game, encouraging Vader’s potty mouth:
Streamer LoserFruit got AI James Earl Jones Darth Vader to say fuck in Fortnite.
The entertainment factor of the AI experiment so far seems limited to trying to break it. pic.twitter.com/JuCCZZa4K7
— AmericanTruckSongs9 (@ethangach) May 16, 2025
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This frankly bizarre addition comes amidst Fortnite’s ongoing Star Wars season, and after seminal Darth Vader voice actor James Earl Jones signed over the rights of his voice to Disney to enable the iconic villain’s voice to continue.
In the world of TV, this has already been used to generate Vader’s voice for the Disney+ show Obi-Wan Kenobi. Now, Fortnite has partnered with Google’s Gemini AI bot and ElevenLabs’ Flash audio model to provide the late actor’s vocals for players in real-time.