Crunchyroll Responds To Criticism Over AI-Generated Subtitles

After reaching out to the company, we were informed by a spokesperson that the subtitles were AI-generated and that they were allegedly provided to Crunchyroll by a third-party vendor instead of being created in-house. They also stated that this use of AI to generate subtitles is something that violates their agreement with that vendor. The company is apparently further investigating the issue and intends to resolve it, presumably meaning they will eventually provide updated subtitles. At the time of publishing this article, the German language subtitles have been altered to remove “ChatGPT said,” although it’s unclear if there were additional changes beyond this.

This situation mirrors a similar incident from last year, when the anime The Yuzuki Family’s Four Sons aired with nonsensical English language subtitles that had missing punctuation, garbled sentences, and exceedingly literal translations that a professional translator would be unlikely to make, prompting many to assume that it was machine translated. In this instance, Crunchyroll also stated that the licensor of the series had provided this poor translation, taking the series off the service before reuploading it roughly a week later with updated English subtitles.

Last year, in an interview with Forbes, Crunchyroll CEO Rahul Purini stated that the company doesn’t plan on using generative AI in the “creative process.” Specifically, he promised that AI and machine learning would only be used for back-end systems, such as recommendation features. While this may remain the case for Crunchyroll’s in-house translation, the same clearly can’t be said for its licensing partners. And while it’s certainly a good sign that the company isn’t wholeheartedly pivoting in that direction, there isn’t much difference to users whether the poor translation they’re reading is created by Crunchyroll directly or one of their partners. Hopefully, a more rigorous subtitle approval process will be implemented to combat this, because it’s clear that the use of AI-generated subtitles benefits no one: not the companies whose credibility tanks, the translators whose jobs are replaced, or the audience.