The Duskbloods‘ first playtest – which will likely mark the first time anyone outside FromSoftware and Nintendo has played the Switch 2 exclusive – is coming next month, yet Google’s AI search believes the subreddit r/TheDuskbloods already has official information.
As spotted and explained by Ian Walker at Video Game Town, the elaborate jokes and shitposts have been going for a while, probably the product of waiting too long for a game without crumbs of new information – a feeling the GTA 6 crowd knows all too well. The main difference here, though, is that the diehard FromSoftware fans are a traditionally goofy bunch.
Characters like Bugout Billy – “the unlockable character you get when you beat the Duskbug Brigade boss in the Underdusk zone” – sound obviously jokey, but what about Blood Mistress Elizabeth, “clearly the fanservice boss”, or Lycan Vrykolakas, who’s described as “Blaidd 2” and “absolute cinema”? User Southern_Copy_6173 went all the way with their ranked list of bosses in The Duskbloods. There are enough lore, aesthetic, and gameplay details in there to fool any casual reader stumbling into the post a few months from now. The thing is the game isn’t out, but Google AI seemingly doesn’t register that as an issue before confidently spewing out the information to unsuspecting searchers… most of the time.
I had to see this for myself, so I asked Google AI for a list of confirmed Duskbloods bosses, but it seems it might have caught up with the conversation, as it perfectly underlined none had been officially announced, but Reddit had been making up a bunch of them. However, questions that were formulated slightly differently could get it to tell me that yes, Lycan Vrykolakas is a real bloke you can fight in the unreleased game, for example.
After that, I decided to push things a bit further with more specific queries, and told Google AI to give me a rundown of Bugout Billy’s features and abilities. Even though it told me it’d pulled this information from the post shared above and identified the nickname as informal, it still gave me a detailed explanation of how to unlock him thanks to leaks (that don’t exist) without identifying the information as fake at any point. Cool, cool.
This behaviour isn’t entirely new, either. This post from two months ago revealed Sanguiphisto, “the undisputed S+ tier challenge” in The Duskbloods, had been picked up by Google AI along with Orlac and Blood Mistress Elizabeth. The well has been poisoned for quite some time. It’s all fun when it’s some random bullshit for an upcoming video game that Google picks up, but the more serious implications should disturb us, especially when the Torment Nexus is demanding more billions, and more resources, with every passing day.
