Crunchyroll will always make me laugh when mentioned. Like a piracy website becomes legit, then corporate, and now it shit itself to death, what a life cycle!
Don’t forget they also spun up their own ‘production studio’, and… it mostly produced basically the anime equivalent of lolcows in terms of their general reception and percieved quality, always overbudget and/or massively missing deadlines, never renewed for another season.
And then that was shut down within 3 years.
Oh right, and the union busting, also very cool.
In 2025, things staying the same as they are rather than getting worse counts as a ‘big win’ :|
You would think its hostage negotiations, boogieman sticking up companies to add A.I. or enshitify, so avoiding it is a perilous task and “big win”.
Literally, just not changing anything is now considered good.
Anime fans lose big after Crunchyroll still in business.
It’s just a delay to soften the blow. Few months they’ll announce AI again.
This is exactly what i predict will happen as well
Crunchyroll actively makes anime worse.
The truth is that right now AI would just do an outright shit job of subtitles. Let alone voice acting any of it. CR’s stance will change years down the line when AI’s abilities change.
Ai actually does pretty decent on subtitles, there isn’t a lot of wiggle room and you don’t need need as much creativity.
Where it shines is in first drafts though, it’s much faster to proofread and correct, than to type it out to begin with.
Lol. Not at all. A well done subtitle changes a lot from a close translation because languages like going from Japanese to English don’t directly translate and still flow. Especially jokes and little quips. AI translations can’t do it at all. You’ll be able to understand the words and get most of the story, but it’s overall makes for a much more lackluster translation than recording everything to make it good.
But that is a localization / translation, not a subtitle.
Translating between languages is different than open captions for a given audio stream.
In the crunchyroll/anime world, subs is pretty much exclusively a translation to a different language.
Also, contextually you’re 100% wrong. Do you even watch anime? Have you ever heard anyone ask if a show is dubbed or if it’s a localization/ translation? Shit no. It’s subbed for Japanese audio with different language words at the bottom, or it’s dubbed if the audio has been added in with a different language.
I refuse to pay for crunchyroll again until they bring back comments and many other removed features.
They were better when they were a piracy site, price not withstanding
I actually hop around a few sites just to read comments on episodes so this is extremely valid.
Just when dubs were getting to a point of not being too bad. Subtitles, especially CC have felt especially bad recently. I would rather wait an extra week or two for good sub or dub then have it done poorly or flat out butcherd with A.I…
Honestly that’s because speeding up localizations by having the first pass be machine-made is not something that waited for GenAI to happen. It’s been going on for a while using good old machine translators.
Now, Google Translate and similar tools have been reliant on machine learning for ages, people just weren’t freaking out about it because “AI” hadn’t gone viral. It’s been weird to watch this sort of thing play out.
FWIW, if they are using the same loc workflow and genAI works better than good old machine translations for a first pass go ahead and do GenAI. From what I’ve seen casually it’s not necessarily faster or more reliable, but I’m not working on loc professionally. Maybe that’s what he means when he talks about using it in “backend processes”?
I’ve noticed it on non-anime as well. It isn’t even good at doing English CC when the spoken language is English.
Wait, is this why subs have been shitty and full of homophones for the last year?
Yet another fucking cringe name to add to the modern corpo lexicon
- Bytedance
- Tencent
- Xpeng
- Crunchyroll
I don’t even know that much about any of these companies or their practices but i just really dislike their names. I genuinely cringe when i read those words, lol
Most of those are based upon non-English language references.
- Tencent - The company name in Mandarin 腾讯 or in téng xùn. When pronounced it sort of sounds like ten cent (but not really to my ear).
- Xpeng - The company name in Mandarin is 小鹏汽车; or in pinyin: Xiǎopéng Qìchē. So for a romanization Xiǎopéng is shortened to Xpeng
- Crunchyroll - Isn’t Crunchyroll a type of a sushi roll?
Or to put it another way, if you’re upset by these names, you should be equally upset with names like Starbucks, LA Fitness, or Del Taco.
- Bytedance - Totally made up, I think for this for this one I think.
