Game developer claims Gemini scraped their private Google Docs for a character's name – but the truth is scarier
Pattern-matching may cause the same damage as a breach
Image by Shutterstock.
- Google's AI knew a secret it shouldn't: A solo developer says Gemini named an unreleased game character that existed nowhere but a private Google Doc.
- The scarier theory: Even without breaching the file, Gemini may have pieced together scattered breadcrumbs with unsettling precision – a pattern-matching feat that feels just as invasive as a breach.
- The mystery remains unsolved: No one, including the developer, has confirmed which explanation is correct – leaving the core question of how Gemini knew the name wide open.
- A warning for creators: With artists and writers already losing entire accounts and manuscripts to Google's AI systems, developers are now telling each other to encrypt their IP before it touches Google Docs.
Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.
A solo game developer is going viral this week after claiming Google’s AI somehow knew the name of an unreleased character – one they say never existed anywhere outside a private Google Doc.
After Google's LLM revealed undisclosed character details to a curious superfan – who then shared them over Discord – the developer began to suspect Gemini had been scraping Google Docs to train its AI.
Using the handle of their solo Canadian indie game development studio, Klub Kofta, the developer took to Reddit to share details about how the player was able to obtain “surprisingly obscure information” about Kofta’s Ocean-themed tower defense game.
Developer and fan probe Gemini
These details prompted Klub Kofta to urge the player to dig deeper and ask Gemini further questions about future content.
According to the player, the AI then came up with the correct name for a new character, “Vantage Tripod,” which had not been previously disclosed.
"The only place where the info exists in a digital form is inside one of my own Google Docs."Game developer Klub Kofta on Reddit
“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!” Klub Kofta claimed on Reddit.
The dev reasons that their title, Operation Octo, “was not big enough” to generate a generic reply consisting of compressed user speculation, so the specific details that the AI threw up – while containing a few inaccuracies – could only have come from their Google account.
After searching their Discord server history, Kofta said there were no previous mentions of the name.
Did Gemini breach Google Docs?
The incident has sparked a discussion around privacy in generative AI and cloud storage, which may have been what Klub Kofta was after. As one Reddit poster speculated, “This is a coordinated attempt at viral marketing for your game.”
“A dev is taking a coincidence out of context and dramatizing it to promote themselves.”Reddit commenter
Yet their shock that the LLM was able to guess the exact title, and the privacy concerns of the posters, appears to be genuine.
Some developers are now urging users to encrypt sensitive IP before it's uploaded to Google Docs – even if that means encrypting terabytes of files.
For its part, Google claims that Gemini can access Google Docs content, but only with express permission – such as being asked to summarize a document – and that it handles any data it does access transiently, without retaining it.
Other theories: if a Doc is shared as "Anyone with the link" and that link is posted publicly, Google could scrape it for training data. Or, if a third-party extension has been granted access to your Docs, Gemini could indirectly see that content through it.
Hallucinations: more damaging than a breach?
At the time of writing, no one – including the developer who raised the issue – has confirmed which explanation is correct, but the longer Discord and Reddit threads do provide some breadcrumbs.
For starters, the character’s name wasn’t entirely secret: weeks earlier, Klub Kofta accidentally revealed the creature’s existence by drawing it during a round of Gartic Phone, an online drawing game played inside the studio’s Discord server.
Fans in that Discord had already pieced together that a creature nicknamed “Tripod Fish” was coming, based purely on that drawing.
Commenter @daniel_adinnu offered a more measured take on X, suggesting fan speculation, community hints, and LLM pattern-matching could explain the outcome without any file access at all.
While "the exact final name, Vantage Tripod, was never typed out publicly," they noted, "the concept, the visual, and community discussion referencing it in Discord messages, were."
As they put it, if Gemini "genuinely reached into a private, unshared Google Doc, that's a serious and disturbing privacy story."
But if it instead "correlated a publicly visible drawing with Discord conversation and a training-data pattern”, that's a different story.
Serious implications for IP owners
What's being framed as "AI read my private document" may really be "AI inferred a specific name from public breadcrumbs with unsettling accuracy" – a story about pattern matching that still has serious implications for those with valuable IP.
"What's being framed as 'AI read my private document' may really be 'AI inferred a specific name from public breadcrumbs with unsettling accuracy.'"Commenter @daniel_adinnu on X
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It’s not the first time Google Docs has been caught up in an IP storm. Earlier this year, Japanese manga artist Masahiro Itosugi lost his entire Google account, including private drafts, Gmail, and YouTube, after automated AI moderation flagged and deleted his files without warning.
In May 2024, romance writer K. Renee lost access to 10 works in progress, amounting to around 220,000 words, when Google Drive deleted her work.
