"If it never gets there, it never gets there"
Crunchyroll disables comments permanently to censor the community and they replaced translators with AI
In a recent interview with The Verge's Decoder podcast, Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini revealed that the anime-focused streaming service was experimenting with implementing AI-generated subtitles for the service's library of titles. Purini's suggestion was that AI could speed up the subtitling and subtitling workflow to launch episodes "as close to the Japanese release as possible" to worldwide anime fans.
Crunchyroll, which was acquired by Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. in 2021 and then merged with Funimation in 2022, is arguably the largest streaming service dedicated primarily to Japanese animation. As of last January, the number of subscribers after the merger amounted to over 13 million. That market share combined with Purini's vision for the potential implementation of AI subtitles led some anime fans and media commentators to express concern.
The core argument: AI technology is far from sophisticated enough to adequately translate the nuances of Japanese speech and text. Then there are concerns about how such AI would affect human translators and localization teams whose work forms the basis of anime simulcasting and dubbing.
