Ubisoft Called Out AI Leak, Leaker Posted Real One

When a corporation tells you your leak is fake, the worst possible move is to prove them right. But when they tell you your leak is AI-altered, and you happen to have the unedited original sitting on your hard drive, the play writes itself.

On May 5, well-known Ubisoft insider j0nathan posted what he claimed was a screenshot from a recent playtest of Assassin's Creed Invictus, the long-rumoured PvP multiplayer spinoff. Writing in French, he warned that much of the game wasn't textured yet and that the image was meant to give a rough sense of the game's current state. The screenshot showed a character holding two weapons in what appeared to be a coliseum setting, heavily watermarked.

The official Assassin's Creed account didn't ignore it. Instead, it fired back with a reply that read: "Nice try… This might have started as an image from our private test, but it's been heavily altered (most probably with AI). Not great to spread misinformation." The account added that it would share more about the project "when the time is right." It was a confident, almost smug response, the kind of community management dunk that usually plays well on social media.

Except j0nathan had the receipts. Less than two hours later, he posted what he said was the original, unaltered screenshot from the Invictus playtest. His caption, translated from French: "Since the official account wants to be clever, here's the real screenshot without AI (and unfortunately for them, it's exactly the same crap)." The two images do look different. The AI-altered version had a more vivid sky, a garish blue and red outfit on the player character, and a crowd that looked off. The original is rougher, with a white outfit, a more muted background, and the kind of unfinished geometry you'd expect from an early playtest build. But the composition, the environment, the camera angle: it's clearly the same scene.

Ubisoft Confirmed the Leak

Here's what makes this such a misfire from Ubisoft's side. By responding at all, and specifically by saying the image "might have started as an image from our private test," the Assassin's Creed account essentially confirmed that j0nathan had access to legitimate playtest material. The complaint was about AI alteration, not about the leak's authenticity. So when j0nathan dropped the clean version, Ubisoft had already done his credibility work for him. I don't know who approved that reply, but they handed a leaker exactly what he wanted on a silver platter.

j0nathan clearly used some kind of AI tool to modify the original screenshot before posting it, and the differences between the two images aren't trivial. The altered version changed colours, smoothed out textures, and made the whole thing look more polished than the actual build. That's a legitimate thing to call out. Leaking early development footage is one thing; running it through an image generator and presenting the output as representative of the game is another. Players deserve to see what a game actually looks like in its current state, not a version that's been cleaned up by an algorithm.

But Ubisoft's response didn't focus on that distinction. It went for the dismissive "nice try" tone, which only works if the person you're dismissing can't immediately prove you wrong. j0nathan spent the rest of the day arguing with people in his replies about getting ratio'd by the official account, but the outcome is clear: we now have a confirmed, unaltered screenshot from an Assassin's Creed Invictus playtest, and Ubisoft's own social media team is the reason we know it's real.

This is the same franchise whose official account previously joked about Black Flag Resynced being "gaming's worst kept secret" after repeated leaks. Ubisoft has had a leak problem for years, and trying to fight it with snarky tweets is not a strategy. If anything, the Invictus situation shows that engaging directly with leakers just amplifies the story. A screenshot from an unfinished multiplayer game that most people would have scrolled past is now a minor news cycle, complete with a confirmed original image and Ubisoft's implicit acknowledgement that the playtest happened.

As for Invictus itself, the unaltered screenshot doesn't reveal much. It's an early build with large untextured areas and placeholder geometry, exactly what j0nathan described. Reports from earlier this month suggested the late April playtest didn't go particularly well. Ubisoft has said it will share more when it's ready, which is fair enough for a game this early in development. But the next time a leak surfaces, whoever runs that Assassin's Creed account might want to just let it go.