Google’s AI Search seemingly leaked unreleased game content and no one knows how

There have been plenty of times when Google’s AI Search has been criticized for providing inaccurate information. In some instances, those screw-ups have been highly public, like when AI Overviews recommended adding glue to pizza. However, it appears that it can also sometimes veer into being unexpectedly accurate. For example, revealing an unannounced character for a game.

The solo developer behind Klub Kofta Studio alleges that Google’s AI Search told a player about an unreleased character for their tower defense game Operation Octo. According to the Reddit post, the player was asking the AI “silly” questions about the game to get a laugh when it suddenly surfaced “surprisingly obscure info that should not be available for a small indie game like mine.” Out of curiosity, the developer asked the player if they could ask the AI about future content for the game, and the AI returned the highly specific character name “Vantage Tripod.”

The developer claims they never told anyone about this character publicly. They add that the character’s name is not present in any of the game files and that “As far as I know,” the information only exists digitally in a private Google Docs file. “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 developer said.

In a statement shared with Polygon, Google denied that it scans private Workspace content to train its AI. Here’s the full statement sent by the company’s representative:

Google does not scan your private Workspace content (which includes Drive and Docs) to train our foundational AI models (including Gemini).
Links to publicly shared docs may be indexed if someone posted them somewhere publicly, where they could be seen by search engine crawlers.
Users are in full control over their sharing settings for Drive content (like Docs) — see this resource for detail on how to adjust them.
More detail on how these privacy settings work can be found here.

It’s unclear how exactly Google’s AI managed to get that unreleased information. And now that the Reddit post has gone viral, any questions you ask the AI about this topic now pulls from this thread.