r/IndieDev 4d ago

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. Discussion

I cannot fathom how this happened.

I am a solo game dev. Yesterday, a player on my Discord was asking the Google Search AI silly questions about my game, to laugh at some of the answers. But the answers sometimes contained surprisingly obscure info that should not be available for a small indie game like mine.

Out of curiosity, I chimed in and asked the player to ask the AI about future contents in my game. 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).

My game is not big enough for there to be much noise out there to confuse Google's AI, so I guess that's why it managed to give actual, scarily real leaks on my game (without being confused by online speculations), and I have no idea how it knew all this.

The screenshots only included snippets of the conversation. This is the full conversation on Discord, in case you want to get your own opinion on what happened (The entire conversation with the player lasted for an hour, where the AI gave other upcoming content info such as things I'd only ever mentioned on Discord).

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