Anime Fans Aren’t Happy With Crunchyroll’s AI Subtitle Testing
Attack on Titan final episode
Crunchyroll is probably the best place to watch anime online, in part because of a long history with anime fans and in part because, after Sony’s acquisition of the company and other anime streaming services, there aren’t many options left. A new interview with the company’s president has revealed that the streaming service is testing the use of generative AI internally, and anime fans aren’t happy.
The interview with Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini comes courtesy of The Verge, who spoke to Purini about a range of topics, including the recent decision to shut down Funimation’s digital copies, the recently launched free anime TV channel, and more. One of the things that came up in the interview, though, was the potential for generative AI to be used.
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The Verge asked Purini about whether the company was looking at generative AI to deliver some of its services, and the answer isn’t what most fans were hoping for.
“AI is definitely something that we think about at a lot of different workflows within the organization,” Purini says, “Right now, one of the areas we are very focused on testing is our subtitling and closed captioning, where we go from speech to text and how do we improve and optimize our processes where we can get the subtitles done in various languages across the world faster so that we can launch as close to the Japanese release as possible. So that’s definitely an area where we are focused on.”
Purini says that the use of AI for dubbing isn’t really possible, because it’s much more of a “creative process,” but did confirm that AI is being tested “across the organization.” He says that generative AI could potentially be used for personalization and discovery, too, but doesn’t really give much of an answer as to how that could happen.
Naturally, anime fans were pretty annoyed that Crunchyroll was dipping its toes into generative AI. Tweets about the story have shown a lot of outrage over the possibility, with users vowing never to unsubscribe from Crunchyroll if generative AI was ever used to translate or produce subtitles. Many also pointed to recent price increases for the service, asking why Crunchyroll would be asking for more money if it was planning on paying fewer people to deliver a worse service.
Generative AI has been a volatile topic in the last couple of years, with plenty of scandals in just the past few months. Fans similarly struck out at manga publisher Bushiroad over its AI translation plans late last year, with many furious manga fans calling it an insult to translators.
Wizards of the Coast was caught up in a scandal early this year, too, after the Magic: The Gathering twitter account backtracked over a controversial AI post. The company initially claimed that Twitter users were wrong about the post using AI-generated artwork, but later admitted that the image came from a vendor and likely used generative AI.
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