- Crunchyroll emitted anime with subtitles obviously generated by AI that included typographic errors, clumsy phrases and lines like “Chatgpt said.”
- Fans quickly realized and criticized the lack of human supervision.
- The incident highlights the growing concerns about the AI that replaces creative roles without adequate review, particularly in location, where the context and tone are crucial.
There are erroneous translations, and then there are chatgpt subtitles that seem to have been deliberately written to disturb people. That is what seemed to happen with some of the translated Japanese that are shown on the screen during recently seen and shared anime episodes online.
The first example of drawing online attention made it clear that Chatgpt was the culprit of uncomfortable and absolutely wrong translations during an episode of Necronomic and the cosmic horror showThe new Crunchyroll anime series about hidden rarity and rotting of the internet brain. He literally included the “Chatgpt line said” in the German and English subtitles.
Fans began publishing screenshots of strange structures of prayers and dialogue they had seen, and now they had an explanation and a source of guilt. The names of poorly written characters, inconsistent phrases and only compensated words and phrases everywhere.
I only observed about two minutes, and I was so frustrated that the subs had errors that even a normal automatic translation would not have given.
– @hilene.bsky.social ( @hilene.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-07-03t02: 47: 11.136z
In case it was not enough, the president of Crunchyroll, Rahul Purini, had told Forbes in an interview only a few months ago that the company had no plans to use in the “creative process.” They were not going to mess with the voice performance or the generation of stories, he said. AI would limit themselves to helping people find programs to see and recommend new programs based on what the spectators had enjoyed previously.
Apparently, Chatgpt translations do not count under that rubric, but location is not a mechanical process, like any human translator could explain.
Location art
Hey, now, show a little respect for the most historical anime runners: the translator’s name
– @viridianjcm.bsky.social ( @viridianjcm.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-07-03t02: 47: 11.132z
Location is a big problem among anime fans. The debates about whether certain subtitles are too literal, too lazy or too limited in their references to be understood outside Japan, have been unleashed for decades. But anyone is likely anywhere in those debates claim that these massive chatgpt mistakes are fine.
Crunchyroll has not officially clarified how this happened, but the reports suggest that the subtitles come from the company’s Japanese production partner. The generated subtitles may have been delivered to Crunchyroll in the air without Crunchyroll being responsible for doing them.
As several people pointed out, when they pay to transmit anime from an important platform such as Crunchyroll, it expects a certain baseline. Even if you do not agree with the options of a locator, at least you can understand where they come from. The fact that nobody apparently reads the chatgpt subtitles before they loaded to a global audience is more difficult to justify.
Translation is an art. The location is not just about replacing Japanese with English. It is tone, cadence, subtext and make a character sound like himself through a language barrier. Ai can guess what words they are going to, but he does not know the characters or the program. It is like a small translation dictionary, which is fine as far as it comes, but it cannot make a conversation make sense without a human reconstructs words. Some fans are outraged enough to request the subscription and share fansubs again, the homemade subtitles written not officially and circulate in VHS days. In other words, Crunchyroll once helped make obsolete offering versions of higher quality license shows.
At a time when more people are watching anime than ever, Crunchyroll is apparently willing to bet that most of us will not notice or care if the words that the characters say make any sense. If Crunchyroll wants to maintain its credibility, you have to treat location not as a technological problem to optimize, but as a component of narration of stories that requires human nuances and judgment. Otherwise, it could be “Gameirver” for Crunchyroll’s reputation.
