Crunchyroll, the popular anime streaming platform, is betting on artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate its subtitling process.
In a recent interview on The Verge’s Decoder podcast, Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini unveiled the company’s experimentation with generative AI for subtitling and closed captioning.
This strategic move aims to provide faster multilingual subtitles, aligning releases more closely with original Japanese air dates.
“AI is something we consider across many workflows within the organization,” Purini explained. “Right now, one key area we’re testing is subtitling and closed captioning. We want to improve our processes so we can produce subtitles in various languages faster, enabling launches as close to the Japanese release as possible.”
AI will Help Against Piracy
Purini hopes that AI-powered translation will help Crunchyroll address a significant industry challenge: piracy.
Fans often turn to pirated content because it’s available with fan-made subtitles far sooner than official releases. By drastically reducing the wait time for officially subtitled episodes, Crunchyroll aims to diminish the appeal of pirated content.
This isn’t Crunchyroll’s first foray into AI-assisted translation. In October 2023, the first episode of The Yuzuki Family’s Four Sons appeared to feature machine-translated subtitles. The resulting inaccuracies drew criticism from fans, prompting Crunchyroll to remove the episode.
The growing use of AI in creative fields is unsurprising, particularly following the release of advanced language models like ChatGPT 3.0. As AI technology continues to evolve, it’s likely that fans will see increasing AI involvement in the anime world.
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Source: The Verge
