If you’ve been trawling the internet for news about Grand Theft Auto 6 in recent weeks, you may have noticed numerous social media posts and Reddit threads alleging that Rockstar Games plans to add a dedicated “twerk button” to the game. It grieves my heart to say this rumor is not true. I fell down the rabbit hole last week, and discovered that most of the twerk button posts can be attributed to just one dude, YouTuber Jeffery Phillips. He tells Polygon it was surprisingly easy to convince Google’s AI overview that the twerk button in GTA 6 was a real thing.
“I think I spent a total of 3 months doing this ‘challenge.’ I started it in July and it was finished late September,” Phillips tells Polygon. “I have no idea how much time I spent posting but it wasn’t an insane amount. Some days I’d just post one or two things.”
It started out as just a fun experiment, mostly on Reddit and X. But given Google’s recent shift to prioritize Reddit threads in its AI search results, all those posts added up quickly. And Phillips soon discovered that Google’s AI seemingly has little ability to distinguish between contextually obvious jokes within a fan community and factual information shared by a game developer or news outlet. When a commenter asked for proof about his twerk button claims on one Reddit thread, Phillips simply responded “Rockstar called me.” Apparently that’s good enough for one of the world’s most powerful and influential tech companies!
“I was definitely surprised to see that I even showed up on the AI overview. Especially since I didn’t even try to make anything with substantial or convincing evidence. I thought at most it would say some people on Reddit think it could be true. I would’ve never expected my own comments being used as a source though,” he explains.
The subreddit Phillips created for the project has seen a surge in popularity since he released his YouTube video, with commenters eager to have their own fun at the expense of Google’s enshittified search experience. “People have been using it to post their own ‘facts’ to try and trick the AI,” he says.
Despite finding himself at the jiggling epicenter of GTA 6 fan discourse over the last several weeks, Philips is pretty measured in his anticipation for Rockstar’s long-awaited sequel.
“Honestly I’m not even that big of [a] GTA fan,” Philips says. “I’ll definitely play it and probably enjoy it but it just doesn’t sit right with me killing those innocent NPCs. I don’t think it will live up to the hype either, with a lot of modern video games people have such insane expectations that it becomes impossible to live up to them. But I think as time passes people will like the game. I’m sure it will be great.”
If you haven’t checked out Phillips’s video, it’s definitely worth a watch. The twerk button discussion begins around the 9:30 mark.
