ChatGPT faceplants while translating Crunchyroll anime, and some viewers are demanding human localization

Date:
Thu, 03 Jul 2025 03:00:00 +0000

Description:
Crunchyroll used ChatGPT to translate anime and it did not go well.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Crunchyr oll aired anime with obviously AI-generated subtitles that included typos, clunky phrasing, and lines like ChatGPT said. Fans quickly noticed and criticized the lack of human oversight The incident highlights growing concerns about AI replacing creative roles without proper review,
particularly in localization, where context and tone are crucial

There are mistranslations, and then there are ChatGPT subtitles that appear
to have been deliberately written to upset people. That's what appeared to happen with some of the translated Japanese shown on screen during episodes
of anime recently spotted and shared online.

The first example to gain attention online made it clear that ChatGPT was the culprit of awkward and outright wrong translations during an episode of Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show , Crunchyrolls new anime series about occult weirdness and internet brain rot. It literally included the line "ChatGPT said" in both the German and English subtitles.

Fans started posting screenshots of bizarre sentence structures and dialogue that they had spotted, and now had an explanation and a source of blame for. Misspelled character names, inconsistent phrasing, and just outright made-up words and phrases were spotted everywhere. (Image credit: Pixel/Bluesky) I only watched about two minutes, and was so frustrated at the subs having errors that even a normal machine translation wouldn't have given. @hilene.bsky.social ( @hilene.bsky.social.bsky.social ) 2025-07-03T02:47:11.136Z

In case that wasn't enough, Crunchyrolls president, Rahul Purini, had told Forbes in an interview only a few months ago that the company had no plans to use AI in the creative process. They werent going to mess with voice acting
or story generation, he said. AI would be restricted to helping people find shows to watch and to recommending new shows based on what viewers had previously enjoyed.

Apparently, ChatGPT translations don't count under that rubric, but localization isn't a mechanical process, as any human translator could explain. Localization art Hey now, show some respect for the most storied of all anime subbers: Translator's name @viridianjcm.bsky.social ( @viridianjcm.bsky.social.bsky.social ) 2025-07-03T02:47:11.132Z

Localizing is a big deal among anime fans. Debates over whether certain subtitles are too literal, too loose, or too limited in their references to
be understood outside Japan have raged for decades. But no one on any side of those debates is likely to claim these massive errors by ChatGPT are okay.

Crunchyroll hasnt officially clarified how this happened, but reports suggest the subtitles came from the company's Japanese production partner. The generated subtitles may have been given to Crunchyroll to air without Crunchyroll being responsible for making them.

As several people pointed out, when you pay to stream anime from a major platform like Crunchyroll, you're expecting a certain baseline of quality. Even if you disagree with a localizer's choices, you can at least understand where they are coming from. The fact that apparently no one read the ChatGPT subtitles before they were uploaded to a global audience is harder to
justify.

Translation is an art. Localization isnt just about replacing Japanese with English. Its about tone, cadence, subtext, and making a character sound like themselves across a language barrier. AI can guess what words go where, but
it doesnt know the characters or the show. It's like a little translation dictionary, which is fine as far as it goes, but it can't make a conversation make sense without a human piecing together the words. A few fans are
outraged enough to call for unsubscribing and going back to sharing fansubs, the homebrewed subtitles unofficially written and circulated back in the days of VHS. In other words, the very thing Crunchyroll once helped make obsolete by offering higher-quality, licensed versions of shows.

At a time when more people are watching anime than ever before, Crunchyroll
is apparently willing to gamble that most of us wont notice or care whether the words characters say make any sense. If Crunchyroll wants to keep its credibility, it has to treat localization not as a tech problem to optimize, but as a storytelling component that requires human nuance and judgment. Otherwise, it might just be "gameorver" for Crunchyroll's reputation. (Image credit: @pi8you/Bluesky) You might also like ChatGPT crosses a new AI threshold by beating the Turing test AI took a huge leap in IQ, and now a quarter of Gen Z thinks AI is conscious ChatGPT model matchup - I pitted OpenAI's o3, o4-mini, GPT-4o, and GPT-4.5 AI models against each other and the results surprised me



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-faceplants -while-translating-crunchyroll-anime-and-some-viewers-are-demanding-human-loca lization


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