About

Darth Vader AI refers to a Darth Vader companion character added to Fortnite for the Star Wars themed Galactic Battle mini-season on May 16th, 2025. When defeated, players can recruit Darth Vader to their squad to help them fight and to talk with him. When spoken to, he will respond in the voice of his original actor, James Earl Jones, using artificial intelligence voice, specifically Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash model and ElevenLabs’ Flash v2.5 model. After the character was released, players began uploading videos of his responses online, with some players able to make Darth Vader swear and say inappropriate things, resulting in memes about the unhinged nature of the AI.

Origin

On May 16th, 2025, Fortnite added Darth Vader to the video game's Galactic Battle mini-season.^[1] In the game, if players find and defeat Darth Vader on the map, he will join their squad to help them fight. Players can also talk with Vader, who will respond using Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash model and ElevenLabs’ Flash v2.5 model AI to generate responses. The character was reportedly released in "close consultation" with James Earl Jones' family.^[2]

Spread

On the day the character was added to the game in mid-May 2025, players began uploading videos of their interactions with him in Fortnite.

For example, on the morning of May 16th, 2025, X^[3] user @ShiinaBR posted a video of streamer Nick Eh 30 interacting with the AI, who references his catchphrase and seems to understand that he's a popular streamer, garnering over 19,000 likes in under a day.

About 40 minutes later, X^[4] user @CivoIsntHere posted a meme about the AI that anticipates it will say some unhinged things, using a clip from The Boys of Stormfront telling Homelander "It's called white genocide" to make the joke, garnering over 3,000 likes in under a day.

Roughly 30 minutes later, X^[5] user @ImCordial posted a clip from Loserfruit's stream in which she gets the Darth Vader AI to swear, garnering over 10,000 likes in a day and 38,000 likes on a repost by X^[6] user @HYPEX. The official Fortnite X account commented under the post, claiming they pushed a hotfix to fix this.

Also on May 16th, 2025, Twitch streamer Ninja posted a video to X^[7] in which he asks Darth Vader if the Low Taper Fade meme is "still massive," garnering over 6,100 likes in a few hours.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References