As if the rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence wasn’t already scary enough, an indie developer says it managed to leak a very specific detail from their upcoming game from private documents.
Over on Reddit, solo game developer Klub Kofta Studio, whose flagship game is the aquatic tower defense title Operation Octo, shared a harrowing Discord interaction they had with a player about an upcoming update. Klub Kofta attached screenshots of the conversation in which the player asked Google’s Gemini AI questions about the game and received “surprisingly obscure info that should not be available for a small indie game like mine.”
That in and of itself isn’t shocking, but Google’s AI chatbot was also talking about future content leaks gleaned from conversations on the game’s Discord. This was “super impressive,” said Klub Kofta, who inadvertently revealed an upcoming creature casually referred to as Tripod Fish when they drew it while playing an online party game called Gartic Phone. Discord users were able to decipher that Tripod Fish was coming to the game based on the drawing, but the exact name of the creature was never revealed publicly, according to Klub Kofta. Google Gemini was able to figure it out regardless.
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“Out of curiosity, I chimed in and asked the player to ask the AI about future contents in my game,” explained the solo dev. “Somehow, the AI spitted out the exact & highly specific character name ‘Vantage Tripod,’ which I had never mentioned to anyone. As far as I know, the only place where the info exists in a digital form is inside one of my own Google Docs, and this was NOT me speaking to the AI! (The player even asked the questions in incognito).”
“The scarily accurate & very specific name ‘Vantage Tripod’ was never written anywhere except in my own Google Doc,” they added.
A player found out the ACTUAL name of my game’s upcoming character from the Google Search AI – I had never told the name to anyone.
from r/IndieDev
I’m hesitant to theorize on how this all could’ve happened considering it’s just one unverified account, but Reddit users speculated that Google automatically opts in users to allow Gemini to scan Google Drive files to train its AI. I couldn’t verify that claim after some digging, but if Klub Kofta’s story is true, it carries some deeply disturbing implications about online privacy in the age of AI.
One Reddit user who called the story “unsettling” suggested some alternate possibilities, including scanned Discord conversations between server members, but Klub Kofta insisted the creature’s name was never revealed anywhere outside of their private Google Drive.
“Even the discord server members have never learned this specific name. I’m certain I’d kept it a secret, and a search history on Discord (as shown in the screenshot) indeed reveals that the keyword had never been said up until this point,” said the dev.
“The character name has never made it into serialized data in the game yet, so the one Google Doc where I kept future character names & descriptions was the only source of information I can think of.”
Forget hackers, with just a few months until GTA 6, Rockstar better be real careful about who’s talking to AI chatbots.
“It creates lesser games”: Indie game studios are supposed to love generative AI, so why do the 25 devs I spoke to avoid it?
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