- Crunchyroll was sent anime with obviously AI-Generated subtitles that included typo, clumsy phrasing and lines like “Chatgpt said.”
- Fans noticed and criticized the lack of human supervision quickly
- The incident highlights growing concerns about AI that replace creative roles without proper review, especially in location where context and tone are crucial
There are distrust and then there are chatgpt subtitles that appear to be deliberately written to disturb people. That’s what seemed to happen to some of the translated Japanese shown on screen during episodes of anime recently discovered and shared online.
The first example that got attention online made it clear that chatgpt was the guilty of awkward and directly wrong translations during an episode of Necronomico and cosmic horror showCrunchyroll’s new Anime Series on Occult Square and Internet Brain Council. It literally included the line “Chatgpt said” in both the German and English subtitles.
Fans started sending screens of bisarre sentence structures and dialogue that they had seen, and now had an explanation and a source of guilt. Erroneous character names, inconsistent phrasing and just directly composed words and phrases were spotted everywhere.
I only saw about two minutes and was so frustrated by the substrates that had errors that even a normal machine translation would not have given.
– @hilene.bsky.social ( @hilene.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-07-03T02: 47: 11.136z
In the event that that wasn’t enough, Crunchyroll’s President Rahul Purini had told Forbes in an interview just a few months ago that the company had no plans to use AI in “creative process.” They would not mess with voice acting or history generation, he said. AI would be limited to helping people find shows to watch and to recommend new shows based on what viewers had previously had.
Apparently, chatgpt translations do not count under this box, but location is not a mechanical process that any human translator could explain.
Localization Art
Hi now, show some respect for the most stored of all anime -Underber: the name of the translator
– @viridianjcm.bsky.social ( @viridianjcm.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-07-03T02: 47: 11.132Z
Localization is a big thing among anime fans. Debates about whether certain subtitles are too literal, too loose or too limited in their references to being understood outside Japan has been raging for decades. But no one on any side of these debates is likely to argue that these massive mistakes of chatgpt are okay.
Crunchyroll has not officially clarified how this happened, but reports suggest that 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 more people pointed out when you pay to stream anime from a larger platform like Crunchyroll, you expect a specific baseline of quality. Even if you disagree with the choice of a location, you can at least understand where they come from. The fact that apparently no one read the chatgpt sub -texts until they were uploaded to a global audience is more difficult to justify.
Translation is an art. Location is not just about replacing Japanese with English. It’s about tone, cadence, subtitle and making a character sound like oneself across a language barrier. AI can guess what words go, but it doesn’t know the characters or the show. It’s like a small translation dictionary that is fine as far as it goes, but it can’t give a conversation make sense without a human merging of the words. A few fans are furious enough to claim unsubscribe and go back to sharing fanubs, the home -brewed subtitles unofficially written and circulated back in VHS’s days. In other words, it was good to do it outdated by offering higher quality, licensed versions of shows.
At a time when more people see anime than ever before, Crunchyroll is apparently willing to gamble, that most of us will not notice or be interested in whether the words characters say make sense. If Crunchyroll wants to maintain its credibility, it should not treat the location as a technical problem to optimize, but as a storytelling component who requires human nuance and judgment. Otherwise, maybe it’s just “gameorver” for Crunchyroll’s reputation.
