AI is trendy. Everyone wants to use it for everything, just like everyone wanted to get involved in cryptocurrencies or NFTs before. The difference is that AI has legitimate uses where it is extremely useful. But like any trend, especially those that settle in the commercial realm, AI is gaining a well-deserved bad reputation for how it is being attempted to be integrated into all areas of life. Even those where it has no utility at all.
The president of Crunchyroll, Rahul Purini, has confirmed in an interview on The Verge’s Decoder podcast that the company is working on using generative AI. He emphasized that they are looking for AI to help users personalize their experience and discover new titles, as well as using it to achieve better work dynamics. He also hinted that they are looking to use it for the aspect that receives the most criticism. Such as generating subtitles through automatic translation.
The reason given to justify it is that with AI they could translate to more languages to make simultaneous or close to the original release date in Japan, of the series. Something that, he emphasized, would be good because it would allow for greater optimization of the process. Ignoring, very intentionally, the final result of them.
All of this leaves many questions unanswered. And many people will wonder, specifically, why using automatic translation for subtitles is so bad. The answer is that the quality of subtitles through AI does not take into account the infinite nuances of languages, which are often complex and challenging even for native speakers in both languages. Something that an algorithm cannot understand, as it is nothing more than a direct translation with the information in its database.
In any case, this move is not surprising because Crunchyroll has a certain history of releasing subtitles that are suspected of not being corrected or made with AI. The clearest example was the first episode of The Yuzuki Family’s Four Sons, a highly anticipated series of the fall 2023 season, whose subtitles were of such low quality that they had to remove the episode and upload them, a week later, completely retranslated. This made many users suspect that they were made with AI and only after the angry reaction from fans, they decided to hire a human translator for it.
Crunchyroll is a company with a history of questionable practices, which will now directly affect users. If they use AI to translate the series subtitles, the final result will be greatly affected. And that’s why, while it is true that AI has legitimate and positive uses for everyone, translation, or any other creative process, is not one of them.
