As the game rolls out a major new update, fans are accusing Fortnite of now containing shoddy AI slop.
The claims began over the weekend. On the r/FortNiteBR subreddit dedicated to the battle royale shooter, some gamers posted screenshots of in-game art that appeared to be the work of an AI model. A poster for a made-up movie called “Mile High Retreat,” for example, shows a yeti with five toes on one foot, and four toes on another — a telltale sign of shoddy AI content.
“Say ‘No’ to AI slop,” a highly upvoted post in the Reddit forum fumed. “A billion-dollar company should have no problem supporting real artists for real art.”
Moderators put up an entire megathread dedicated to the controversy. In a poll attached to the thread, over 80 percent of respondents said that AI content “doesn’t belong in Fortnite or other video games.”
While nothing’s been confirmed yet, the timing is notable. Just last week, Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games, which owns Fortnite, complained about the video game storefront Steam’s policy that requires developers to disclose if their products use AI-generated content. In sum, he felt that Steam was unfairly singling out AI usage, which he claims is already essential to game development.
“The AI tag is relevant to art exhibits for authorship disclosure, and to digital content licensing marketplaces where buyers need to understand the rights situation,” Sweeney tweeted last week. “It makes no sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in nearly all future production.”
Later, Sweeney mocked the idea of AI disclosures outright. “Why stop at AI use? We could have mandatory disclosures for what shampoo brand the developer uses,” he sneered. “Customers deserve to know lol.”
At least one of the AI accusations appears to be wrong. After more obvious-seeming AI-slop like the nine-toed yeti made rounds, the ensuing wave of paranoia turned on an anime-style image of Marty McFly from “Back to the Future.” Some said it looked “Ghiblified,” referring to the popular trend of using AI to produce images imitating the anime studio’s iconic style, which OpenAI kicked off earlier this year.
But the illustrator behind the image, Sean Dove, cleared the air on Instagram, saying that it was a hand drawn creation — though he conceded that the wonky-looking clocks in the background may have been AI because they were taken from stock images.
The Fortnite update also brought with it a new emote with music that some are saying is also AI-generated, though the case for this one is also uncertain. The k-pop style track, “Latata,” shares the same name of a hit song released by the actual girl group i-dle over seven years ago, and features suspiciously fake-looking album art.
It’s a muddy situation, in other words — but if one thing’s clear, it’s that AI-generated imagery has permanently eroded people’s trust in what’s real, often to the detriment of flesh and blood artists.
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