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.
