The automatic subtitles of Crunchyroll anger anime fans.
Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show, one of Crunchyroll's new series, reveals that a translator used ChatGPT to create the subtitles.
In early last year, Crunchyroll's president, Rahul Purini, mentioned that the company was "very focused on testing" generative artificial intelligence tools for subtitling and speech-to-text transcription. This comment came just months after the platform temporarily removed the first episode of one of its new series, The Yuzuki Family's Four Sons, due to complaints about the quality of the subtitles. Many of the texts featured absurd translations as well as punctuation issues in several sentences. At that time, some followers speculated that the company had used artificial intelligence to translate the episode. Recently, clear evidence has emerged that Crunchyroll is using ChatGPT to translate new episodes of anime, and the results have been disappointing.
A Bluesky user, Pixel, identified a problem with the German subtitles for Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show, one of the series Crunchyroll is streaming this season. Aside from the obvious lack of polish, an opening line in a crucial scene of the episode said, "ChatGPT said...". Engadget was able to independently verify that the episode includes this AI-generated translation. As for the English subtitles, they don't seem to be much better.
User reactions have been one of discontent, especially considering that Crunchyroll subscriptions start at $8 per month and that, since its acquisition by Sony, the platform has become a dominant player outside Japan. One user expressed frustration in a post, questioning how one can expect to pay for a service that clearly does not care about the quality of its products. That post has been cited over 300 times and shared by thousands of people. Many fans are opting for fan-subbed versions downloaded illegally, labeling the AI-generated translations as "unwatchable." Similar frustrations have also been expressed on Reddit.
Interestingly, when Purini shared that Crunchyroll was testing generative AI tools for subtitles, he pointed out that part of the motivation was to prevent piracy. His reasoning was that this technology would allow the company to begin streaming new anime episodes translated as close to their original release in Japan as possible, thus reducing the wait time that sometimes pushed fans to resort to torrents to watch the shows.