Fortnite Swaps Out Track Art After Fans Spot Google Gemini AI Watermark
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Epic Games has quietly replaced the artwork for a Fortnite Festival track after fans noticed the original image carried a Google Gemini AI watermark. The art accompanied "Meow" by Ironmouse, Sleeping Forest & HalaCG, and the new version no longer shows the mark. The watermark appears to have come from the track's original cover art, not from Epic.
How the watermark surfaced
Epic added "Meow" to Fortnite last month, and the Gemini watermark sat in the bottom right corner of the track artwork. It went largely unnoticed until last weekend, when a wider discovery set off a minor stir on social media and Reddit.
As of this morning, the in-game art has been swapped for an alternate version without the watermark.
Not Epic's own artwork
The Gemini mark was already present in the cover art Epic incorporated into the game. The same mark appears on the track's Spotify listing. That points to whoever made the original track art as the source of the AI usage, not Epic Games.
Why fans reacted
AI-generated art in Fortnite is a touchy subject for the community. Fans have pointed to earlier examples, such as an in-game poster showing a nine-toed character in a hammock, as evidence that Epic was turning to low-quality AI work instead of human designers. A more recent official developer video also showed how the company experiments with AI in the concept phase when designing characters and in-game locations.
Epic has never strictly confirmed that any particular piece of in-game art is AI generated, and it has kept up at least a veneer of quality on the battle royale it works to keep popular. Nothing in Fortnite has yet matched Call of Duty's six-fingered Santa for sheer awkwardness.
The replacement suggests Epic doesn't want artwork with obvious AI traces, such as a Gemini watermark, appearing in Fortnite.
Disney and Epic
Separately, over the weekend Disney stated that its rumored interest in buying Epic Games is not something it plans to act on, at least for now.
