- Crunchyroll broadcast an anime with subtitles obviously generated by AI which included typing faults, a clumsy phrasing and lines like “Chatgpt said”.
- Fans quickly noticed and criticized the lack of human surveillance
- The incident highlights increasing concerns concerning the replacement of creative roles without appropriate examination, in particular in location, where the context and the tone are crucial
There are translation errors, then there are Chatgpt subtitles which seem to have been deliberately written to upset people. This is what seemed to happen with some of the Japanese translated shown on the screen during episodes of anime recently spotted and shared online.
The first example to attract online attention clearly indicated that the chatpt was the guilty of clumsy and pure and simple translations during an episode of Necronomico and The Cosmic Horror ShowThe new Crunchyroll anime series on occult strangeness and internet brain rot. He literally understood the line “Chatgpt said” in German and English subtitles.
Fans began to publish screenshots of bizarre phrases and dialogue structures they had spotted, and now had an explanation and a source of blame. Names of badly spelled characters, incoherent sentences and compensation words and sentences have been identified everywhere.
I only looked around for two minutes, and I was so frustrated by submarines with errors that a normal machine translation would not have given.
– @ hilene.bsky.social ( @ hilene.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-07-03t02: 47: 11.136Z
In the event that it was not enough, the president of Crunchyroll, Rahul Purini, told Forbes in an interview only a few months ago that the company did not intend to use AI in the “creative process”. They were not going to play with a voice game or a generation of stories, he said. The AI would be limited to helping people find shows to watch and recommend new programs according to what viewers had previously appreciated.
Apparently, Chatgpt translations do not count under this section, but location is not a mechanical process, as any human translator could explain it.
Localization art
Hey now, show a little respect for the underlying of all anime: the name of the translator
– @ viridianjcm.bsky.social ( @ viridianjcm.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-07-03t02: 47: 11.132z
Location is a big problem among anime fans. The debates on the question of whether certain subtitles are too literal, too loose or too limited in their references to be understood outside Japan have been raging for decades. But no one on the other side of these debates is likely to claim these massive errors by Chatgpt are not correct.
Crunchyroll did not officially specify how it happened, but the reports suggest that the subtitles come from the Japanese production partner of the company. The subtitles generated may have been given from crunchyroll to the air without Crunchyroll being responsible for making them.
As many people have pointed out, when you pay to broadcast anime from a large platform like Crunchyroll, you expect a certain quality base. Even if you do not agree with the choices of a locker, you can at least understand where they come from. The fact that nobody appears to read Chatgpt subtitles before being downloaded to a global audience is more difficult to justify.
Translation is an art. Location is not only to replace Japanese with English. These are tone, cadence, subtext and to make a character look like a language barrier. AI can guess what words go where, but it does not know the characters or the show. It is like a small translation dictionary, which is very well with regard to, but he cannot have a sense of conversation without a human by assembling the words. A few fans are sufficiently indignant to call for unsubscribe and returning to share fansubs, home subtitles officially written and disseminated during VHS. In other words, the very thing even crunchyroll has once helped to make obsolete by offering versions of better quality license.
At a time when more people look at anime than ever, Crunchyroll is apparently ready to play that most of us will not notice or don’t care about words that the characters say they have a meaning. If Crunchyroll wants to maintain its credibility, it must deal with location not as a technological problem to optimize, but as a narrative component which requires human nuances and judgment. Otherwise, it could be “gameorver” for the reputation of Crunchyroll.
