Crunchyroll ran embarrassingly bad ChatGPT subtitles on its new anime series

The subtitles for one of Crunchyroll’s newest anime series make it pretty clear that the company is going all in on ChatGPT.

This week as viewers logged on to Crunchyroll to check out Studio Gokumi’s Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show, many were surprised to see that the series’ subtitles were filled with typos, grammatical errors, and explicit references to ChatGPT. The subtitles seemed very much like text that had been generated with AI and slapped onto Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show without first being reviewed and edited for accuracy.

Errors in subtitles aren’t unheard of, but sentences like “Is gameorver. if you fall, you are out” are an entirely different kind of bad. And the fact that some of the subtitles literally start with “ChatGPT said,” all but confirms that the text was generated with AI.

Speaking to Forbes back in April, Purini said that Crunchyroll was “not considering AI in the creative process” out of a desire to maintain the authenticity of its series and films. Purini also stressed that Crunchyroll would not use AI in ways that would impact voice actors.

But Purini said that the company was actively looking into ways that it could use AI to improve discoverability, recommendations, and personalization. Crunchyroll did not respond to our questions about how Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show’s subtitles are produced and what sort of steps the company takes to prevent errors like this from making it into shows.

Everything about this fiasco speaks to the important role that translators and localization teams play in producing quality art that’s consumed by audiences across the role. This also highlights the pitfalls of the entertainment industry’s rush to embrace generative AI while putting real peoples’ jobs at risk. From Crunchyroll’s perspective, using ChatGPT to churn out subtitles as quickly as possible might seem like a good idea in terms of making it easier to get shows streaming shortly after their Japanese debuts. But subtitles this poorly written make for a worse watching experience and are anything but “authentic.”