Crunchyroll Faces Backlash Over AI-Generated Subtitles in Anime Series

Crunchyroll ran embarrassingly bad ChatGPT subtitles on its new anime series

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. Crunchyroll has been open about its desire to use AI as it focused on becoming more of a lifestyle brand. But this situation is decidedly at odds with Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini's past comments about the company having no plans to use AI to produce its programming. 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."

Crunchyroll's lazy AI subtitles have anime fans furious

At the start of last year, Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini told The Verge the company was "very focused on testing" generative AI tools for subtitling and captioning speech to text. The comment came just months after the streamer temporarily took down the debut episode of one of its newest shows, The Yuzuki Family's Four Sons, after people complained about poor subtitles. Much of the translation was nonsensical, with missing punctuation in many sentences. At the time, some fans speculated the company had used AI to translate the episode. Now there appears to be definitive proof Crunchyroll is using ChatGPT to translate new anime episodes, and the results are about as bad as you would expect. On July 1, Bluesky user Pixel spotted that the German subtitles for Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show, one of the new series Crunchyroll is streaming this anime season, read "ChatGPT said..." during a pivotal scene in the show's debut episode. Engadget was able to independently verify the episode contains the AI-generated translation. If you're curious, the English subtitles aren't much better, as seen in the screenshots above and below. Crunchyroll did not immediately respond to Engadget's comment request. People are understandably upset about the subtitles. Crunchyroll subscriptions start at $8 per month, and since its acquisition by Sony, the service is the dominant player outside of Japan. "This is not acceptable. How can we be expected to pay for a service that clearly doesn't care about the quality of its products?" wrote Pixel in their original post. As of the writing of this article, their post has been quoted more than 300 times and reposted by thousands of other people. Many fans say they're turning to torrented fansubs, calling the official AI-generated translations "unwatchable." Ironically, when Purini revealed Crunchyroll was testing generative AI tools for subtitles, he said part of the motivation was to prevent piracy. He reasoned the tech would allow the company to start streaming new, translated anime episodes as close to their original Japanese release as possible, adding the lag between official releases was sometimes what pushed fans to torrent shows.

Crunchyroll blames third-party vendor for AI subtitle mess

The company is working to fix the subtitles for "Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show." At the start of last year, Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini told The Verge the company was "very focused on testing" generative AI tools for subtitling and captioning speech to text. The comment came just months after the streamer temporarily took down the debut episode of one of its newest shows, The Yuzuki Family's Four Sons, after people complained about poor subtitles. Much of the translation was nonsensical, with missing punctuation in many sentences. At the time, some fans speculated the company had used AI to translate the episode. Earlier this week, fresh accusations of AI use came up when an episode of new anime showed evidence ChatGPT was used to write the subtitles. On July 1, Bluesky user Pixel spotted an issue with the German subtitles for Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show, one of the new series Crunchyroll is streaming this anime season. Beyond a general sloppiness, one line began with the words "ChatGPT said..." during a pivotal scene in the show's debut episode. Engadget was able to independently verify the episode contains the AI-generated translation. If you're curious, the English subtitles aren't much better, as seen in the screenshots above and below. "We were made aware that AI-generated subtitles were employed by a third-party vendor, which is in violation of our agreement," a Crunchyroll spokesperson told Engadget. "We are investigating the matter and are working to rectify the error." People were understandably upset about the subtitles. Crunchyroll subscriptions start at $8 per month, and since its acquisition by Sony, service has been the dominant player in the anime streaming market outside of Japan. "This is not acceptable. How can we be expected to pay for a service that clearly doesn't care about the quality of its products?" wrote Pixel in their original post. As of the writing of this article, their post has been quoted more than 300 times and reposted by thousands of other people. Many fans say they're turning to torrented fansubs, calling the official AI-generated translations "unwatchable." People on Reddit have expressed similar frustrations. Ironically, when Purini revealed Crunchyroll was testing generative AI tools for subtitles, he said part of the motivation was to prevent piracy. He reasoned the tech would allow the company to start streaming new, translated anime episodes as close to their original Japanese release as possible, adding the lag between official releases was sometimes what pushed fans to torrent shows.

Crunchyroll faces backlash over low-quality AI subtitles

Sony's anime-focused streaming service Crunchyroll has come under fire after users pointed out substandard AI-generated subtitles in several of its series. For example, viewers reportedly saw the phrase "ChatGPT said" in the German subtitles for Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show. Both the English and German captions have been criticized for being sloppy and difficult to understand. Engadget reports that Crunchyroll confirmed a third-party provider violated its agreement by using AI, and the company is now investigating the incident. The company's CEO, Rahul Purini, previously said in an interview with The Verge that Crunchyroll has been testing AI subtitles to release episodes more quickly.

ChatGPT faceplants while translating Crunchyroll anime, and some viewers are demanding human localization

The incident highlights growing concerns about AI replacing creative roles without proper review, particularly in localization, where context and tone are crucial There are mistranslations, and then there are ChatGPT subtitles that appear to have been deliberately written to upset people. That's what appeared to happen with some of the translated Japanese shown on screen during episodes of anime recently spotted and shared online. The first example to gain attention online made it clear that ChatGPT was the culprit of awkward and outright wrong translations during an episode of Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show, Crunchyroll's new anime series about occult weirdness and internet brain rot. It literally included the line "ChatGPT said" in both the German and English subtitles. Fans started posting screenshots of bizarre sentence structures and dialogue that they had spotted, and now had an explanation and a source of blame for. Misspelled character names, inconsistent phrasing, and just outright made-up words and phrases were spotted everywhere. I only watched about two minutes, and was so frustrated at the subs having errors that even a normal machine translation wouldn't have given. -- @hilene.bsky.social ( @hilene.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-07-03T02:47:11.136Z In case that wasn't enough, Crunchyroll's president, Rahul Purini, had told Forbes in an interview only a few months ago that the company had no plans to use AI in the "creative process." They weren't going to mess with voice acting or story generation, he said. AI would be restricted to helping people find shows to watch and to recommending new shows based on what viewers had previously enjoyed. Apparently, ChatGPT translations don't count under that rubric, but localization isn't a mechanical process, as any human translator could explain. Hey now, show some respect for the most storied of all anime subbers: Translator's name -- @viridianjcm.bsky.social ( @viridianjcm.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-07-03T02:47:11.132Z Localizing is a big deal among anime fans. Debates over whether certain subtitles are too literal, too loose, or too limited in their references to be understood outside Japan have raged for decades. But no one on any side of those debates is likely to claim these massive errors by ChatGPT are okay. Crunchyroll hasn't officially clarified how this happened, but reports suggest the subtitles came from the company's Japanese production partner. The generated subtitles may have been given to Crunchyroll to air without Crunchyroll being responsible for making them. As several people pointed out, when you pay to stream anime from a major platform like Crunchyroll, you're expecting a certain baseline of quality. Even if you disagree with a localizer's choices, you can at least understand where they are coming from. The fact that apparently no one read the ChatGPT subtitles before they were uploaded to a global audience is harder to justify. Translation is an art. Localization isn't just about replacing Japanese with English. It's about tone, cadence, subtext, and making a character sound like themselves across a language barrier. AI can guess what words go where, but it doesn't know the characters or the show. It's like a little translation dictionary, which is fine as far as it goes, but it can't make a conversation make sense without a human piecing together the words. A few fans are outraged enough to call for unsubscribing and going back to sharing fansubs, the homebrewed subtitles unofficially written and circulated back in the days of VHS. In other words, the very thing Crunchyroll once helped make obsolete by offering higher-quality, licensed versions of shows. At a time when more people are watching anime than ever before, Crunchyroll is apparently willing to gamble that most of us won't notice or care whether the words characters say make any sense. If Crunchyroll wants to keep its credibility, it has to treat localization not as a tech problem to optimize, but as a storytelling component that requires human nuance and judgment. Otherwise, it might just be "gameorver" for Crunchyroll's reputation.

Crunchyroll Accidentally Left AI Slop in Anime Subtitles

Crunchyroll, the massively popular anime streaming service and distributor, just got caught using obvious AI slop in its subtitles. The slipup was made in the premiere episode of a new series called "Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show" -- and trust us, there's no guesswork involved in sniffing out the AI here. Around the 19:12 mark, the show's German subtitles feature a big fat "ChatGPT said:" jammed into the dialog. A classic, lazy error. (We double checked, and it's still there as of this morning.) The fans who spotted this shoddy work didn't hold back in expressing their disappointment. "This is not acceptable," wrote a user on Bluesky who was among the first to flag the AI usage. "How can we be expected to pay for a service that clearly doesn't care about the quality of its products?" This might not come as a surprise to astute anime fans who've long complained about the quality of some of the service's subtitles. In late 2023, Crunchyroll infamously was forced to take down the first episode of the series "The Yuzuki Family's Four Sons" after the subs turned out to be outrageously bad. Errors ranging from random punctuation to straight up getting a character's name wrong raised the specter of machine translation. Recently, some fans have found that the errors typically arise from the English closed captions -- designed to be watched with the English dub -- which show telltale signs of automation in how the text would incorrectly transcribe names or refer to characters that don't exist. Pinning the blame for this latest incident is a bit tricky, though, since translations come from a variety of sources -- sometimes from the production company, or the show's license holder, or from Crunchyroll's team. Regardless, it won't help Crunchyroll's case that it's openly flirted with -- and flip-flopped on -- AI for some time now. In an interview with The Verge last year, CEO Rahul Purini said that using AI to put out subtitles faster was "definitely an area where we are focused on." "AI is definitely something that we think about at a lot of different workflows within the organization," Purini said in the interview. "Right now, one of the areas we are very focused on testing is our subtitling and closed captioning, where we go from speech to text and 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 has since changed his tune. In an interview with Forbes in April, he insisted that the company is"not considering AI in the creative process, including our voice actors." "We consider them to be creators because they are contributing to the story and plot with their voice," Purini added. Fans were quick to declare victory at the time. Maybe it was premature.

Anime streaming site Crunchyroll accidentally leaves ChatGPT listed in subtitles, months after streaming boss said the site is "not considering" using AI

A major Crunchyroll goof features ChatGPT being listed in a subtitled anime line Popular anime streaming site Crunchyroll is the latest platform to be caught out for using ChatGPT to translate subtitles, and fans are very disappointed. The situation came to light when new anime series Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show hit Crunchyroll on Tuesday, June 1. When one German fan went to watch the show with subtitles on, they found that the site had used ChatGPT to translate the episode. User Pixel posted a screenshot of the subtitles on Bluesky, captioned, "Beyond disappointed to find Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show's subs on Crunchyroll are blatantly and openly ChatGPT." Check out another screenshot below. A you can see above, the German subtitles read, "ChatGPT said:Wenn ich die Welt von hier an weiter genießen kann." This takes place at 19:12 in the first episode of the new Cygames series. Although ChatGPT does not show up in subtitles for other languages for that same scene, AnimeNewsNetwork found that the English subtitles include multiple translation errors, which suggests AI use. Other fans are not happy about it either, as one responded to Pixel's post, "The complete lack of care and basic attention to detail is frankly impressive." And another added, "Man, this is so embarrassing. Even using ChatGPT correctly was too much effort for them." This comes just over 2 months after Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini said that the site "is not considering AI in the creative process," in an interview with Forbes. Although Purini did mention that the site will be working with AI in other ways in order to improve how users find content, get recommendations, and receive a more personalized experience, there was no mention of using it for translations. This poses the question: just how many other anime shows are translated by ChatGPT? There is no way to know, but it is a worry that this continues to happen in an age where more and more creative jobs are being taken by AI, especially in the animation industry. Crunchyroll is yet to issue a statement addressing the issue.