In a recent interview with The Verge about the future of what is now the dominant anime streaming platform in the west, Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini suggested that one way to combat anime piracy should be an embrace of AI models to speed up the subtitling process. But AI won’t do anything of the sort—and a fraught aspect of the process of bringing anime to global audiences will only get messier with it.
“A.I. is definitely something we think about at a lot of different workflows in the organization. Right now, one of the areas we’re very focused on testing is subtitling and our closed captioning where we go from speech to text,” Purini told Verge’s Decoder podcast in a recent interview about the company’s rise to one of the defacto platforms for streaming anime, and the recent fallout of its subsumption of Funimation. “How do we improve and optimize our processes where we can get the subtitles done in various languages across the world faster so that we can launch as close to the Japanese release as possible?”
Purini made the comments suggesting ways Crunchyroll could close the gap on piracy of anime content, arguing that quicker turnaround on official subtitling is an effective deterrent. But the platform already offers “simulcast” broadcasts— concurrent releases of subtitled content day-and-date with their releases in Japan—on a considerable amount of its major seasonal releases, so would closing the gap of hours really have much of an impact? If anything, pivoting away from human-led subtitling and closed captioning with the machine learning technology we have in the hear and now is only going to lead to a far messier product (go on Youtube and look at auto-generated captions and see how they compare to properly captioned videos for an easy example).
Translators and captioners are already roles that are both underserved financially given their importance in the anime industry, and already frequently targeted by the ire of anime viewers that embrace the right-wing culture war over perceived “censorship” of Japanese media, alleging that any kind of deviation from anything but as direct and plain a translation of the original material as an indicator of western values’ supposed influence on the source. Japanese is a language full of nuances, contextual words and phrases, and its own whole set of idioms and colloquialisms that are more often than not incredibly difficult to effectively translate literally—and effectively translating it on a weekly simulcast schedule, in a way that can communicate those subtleties and contexts, to make sense to non-Japanese-speaking audiences is already a difficult task even before considering the aforementioned culture war backlash against the profession. It’s already hard enough for humans, for large language models that still struggle enough with stringing together coherent English that’s a task that is still far from attainable.
And the thing is, Crunchyroll already knows what could come of this—just last October, the streamer had to pull the first episode of the coming-of-age adaptation The Yuzuki Family’s Four Sons after viewers found its subtitles were of such low quality, including grammar mistakes, nonsensical sentence structure, and a general incoherence that was so bad it led many to assume they had been either assisted by, or done wholly, through machine translation. Large language models have come a long way in the last year, often distressingly so for creatives in the broader business of writing. But they are far from the level of being able to effectively and quickly translating and captioning to achieve a turnaround that CEOs like Purini could make content so immediately accessible it’ll deter piracy (itself a futile endeavor, if you look at general streaming piracy trends in the first place), at least not without the necessary assistance of actual human translators and caption writers helping to polish them up in the first place.
And at that point, why not just let those people do their jobs—and maybe give them the support they need, financial or otherwise, to help them do it to the best of their abilities?
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