Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a major topic of contention in the anime industry over the past year or so, and the discourse shows no signs of slowing down. Recently, Crunchyroll CEO Rahul Purini revealed that the company is testing generative AI for subtitling anime.
Purini talked about this in an interview on The Verge’s Decoder podcast, which was released on February 26. While Purini talked about a lot of plans for Crunchyroll, the discussion about AI got the most attention.
CEO Rahul Purini Reveals Crunchyroll Is Testing AI for Subtitles
AI has already made waves in the industry. After all, the likes of Netflix and Wit Studio have experimented with AI for background art, while manga publishers such as Shueisha are also experimenting with AI lettering.
Thus, it’s no surprise that Purini mentioned how AI is something that Crunchyroll is focused on when it comes to subtitling and closed captioning.
Purini stated that their current testing focus is on improving and optimizing the subtitling process with AI. This is so that subtitles in various languages are released across the world faster.
There was no mention of any specific details about the types of experiments for anime subtitling, but Purini did state that AI for dubbing is not yet feasible.
AI Anime Dubbing Is Not a Focus Yet
As Crunchyroll is also in the business of anime dubs, Purini stated that despite the advancement of AI, the technology isn’t there yet for dubbing.
Purini remarked that Crunchyroll’s dubs are not direct translations and that they are made to fit the humor of each language. There’s also the fact that lip syncing is also a big factor in writing dub scripts.
Despite the technology not being sufficient yet for the dubbing process, Purini acknowledged that Crunchyroll has plans to integrate generative AI in the personalization and discovery aspect of the platform.
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Crunchyroll AI Focus Draws Mixed Response from Anime Fans
Whenever the topic of AI is brought up in the anime and manga community, it often gets a broadly negative response. This is also the case with Purini’s AI statements.
On Reddit’s r/anime, a thread discussing the interview has gotten over 700 comments, with most being critical about the focus on AI regarding subtitle quality.
There are others with more neutral reactions though, as some believe AI can be useful in streamlining subtitling workflow without fully replacing a human translator.
Given this development, it’s likely that we’ll hear more of Crunchyroll’s plans regarding generative AI. After all, pretty much every tech or tech-adjacent company has been experimenting with it at this point.
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