Video game developers of any size have plenty of challenges to face, like mass refunds of their short game or two developers releasing games with the same name during the same week. A new obstacle to worry about? AI scraping private documents and leaking unannounced information about their games.
That’s what happened to Klub Kofta Studio, a self-described solo developer of the tower defense game Operation Octo, which launched on Steam in September 2025. In a post on Reddit, they shared Google’s AI told a player the name of an upcoming Operation Octo character that Klub Kofta Studio had never publicly shared. “I had never told the name to anyone,” they wrote in the post title.
Klub Kofta Studio has not yet responded to a request for comment from gamexplore. A representative for Google told gamexplore that Google does not scan private content to train its AI. They offered the following points of context:
- 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.
As Klub Kofta Studio explained it on Reddit, a player in their Discord server was asking the Google search AI “silly questions” about the game to get a kick out of the answers. “But the answers sometimes contained surprisingly obscure info that should not be available for a small indie game like mine.”
Klub Kofta Studio asked the player to throw some questions at the AI about future, unannounced content. “Somehow, the AI spitted out the exact & highly specific character name ‘Vantage Tripod’, which I had never mentioned to anyone,” they wrote. “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!” They shared screenshots of a snippet of their conversation on Discord, including their befuddled reactions to the AI’s eerily correct answers.
“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,” they said.
Google’s AI overview has a habit of pulling information from Reddit threads for answers, correct or otherwise. The AI overview can also be manipulated, which in turn can cause it to dole out unreliable misinformation. Last year, a YouTuber managed to convince Google’s AI search that GTA 6 would include a “twerk button” through a fairly low-effort shitposting project.
As people on Reddit and Bluesky have pointed out, Google automatically opts users into sharing their Google Drive data with Google to improve AI models, among other uses. (You can head to Google support to learn how to manage how your activity interacts with Google’s Gemini features.) For years now, large tech companies have been quietly updating their terms of service and opting users into allowing the use of their data for AI model training.
“It’s what companies do. Quietly opt all your stuff into AI while trying to avoid announcing it, then bury an option to opt out. The fuckers,” one person commented on the Reddit thread. Others are worried about more personal information being leaked by AI overviews based on information in users’ “private” (heavy air quotes here) Google Drives. “Doesn’t that mean you can dox people by asking very specific questions given that people’s private personal data is included in the training sets then?……” another commentor mused.
If you haven’t yet, now would be a good time to look into who has access to your public and private data and what they’re using it for. Living in an off-the-grid log cabin never seemed more appealing.
