In May 2025, Fortnite added an interactive Darth Vader character whose voice was generated in real time by AI — not recorded by a human actor. Players could speak to Vader using their microphone, and an AI system responded in his voice and stayed in character. The feature triggered a formal labor complaint from the Hollywood actors' union SAG-AFTRA, which argued the AI replaced a union voice actor who had played the role for nearly 30 years.

The system uses Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash large language model to generate contextually appropriate dialogue — responding to a player's skin, nearby locations, squad status, and Star Wars lore. ElevenLabs Flash v2.5 then converts that text into speech using a voice model built on recordings of the late James Earl Jones, who had signed his voice rights over to Lucasfilm in 2022. Within hours of launch, players found ways to manipulate the AI into producing profanity, prompting a rapid hotfix. On May 19, 2025, SAG-AFTRA filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board, arguing that voice actor Scott Lawrence — who voiced Vader in video games from 1994 to 2023 — was displaced by the AI system. Epic subsequently added parental controls allowing parents to disable AI interaction features.