Coop and Lucas discuss Amazon's surprise rollout of AI dubs and its fallout.
Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network. Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
Lucas
Coop, we've got a little over three weeks left in 2025, and doing this column at the end of the year can prove tricky! Sure, we have the annual Secret Santa anime watch-through coming up, but the holiday season that motivates that column also quiets the rest of the industry and community. There's just not a lot for us to talk about this time of year. After all, it's not like the biggest anime controversy of the year would drop at the 11th hour...
Oh wait! That's exactly what happened with Amazon rolling out AI dubs for anime on their platform like Banana Fish, Vinland Saga, and No Game, No Life Zero over the Thanksgiving weekend!
Coop
Now that's one fat turkey, kids. Amazon didn't stop at anime either, with the beloved Gamera: Guardian of the Universe also getting hit with the AI dub stick. While this incident has been centered around a handful of anime titles, I can easily imagine other foreign films being quietly ensnared without many noticing it—just like they tried to pull with Banana Fish and other titles. I'm all the more thankful that we've still got plenty of eagle-eyed anime fans out there.
The only thing less human than these AI dub performances is the decision to sign off on them
A company this big can pay human actors a decent wage, not produce slop that intentionally removes the human element.
Because even if pigs flew and these performances were "good," the use of AI here is insulting to viewers (both English and Spanish speakers), rights holders, industry members, and the actors who breathe life into these roles. It's an affront to the creative spirit itself.
You've expressed that perfectly, Coop, and it's no wonder that there was an outcry against this development from voice actors, translators, and, functionally, every working professional in the anime industry who cares about this craft and community. People were/are pissed and rightfully so!
Not to mention the numerous allegations of Crunchyroll switching over to an AI solution for closed captioning.
In all of these situations, the implementation of this nonsense is putting people out of work. People who busted their butts putting out high-quality work every week on mindbendingly tight turnaround times. And also let us not forget that many voiceover artists working in anime have been fighting like hell to ensure better pay and working conditions for everyone. In the process, Kyle McCarley was forced to say goodbye to one of his signature roles while begging CR leadership for a quick "hi, hello" meeting with SAG-AFTRA back in 2022. It's not just CR, but large corporations on the whole, trying to drown talented people who are already barely treading water. This includes Amazon.
Beyond how completely incompetent these AI dubs are, the long-simmering and more than justified resentment for how these anime distribution companies are treating the people who work on these projects is a big part of why this AI dub debacle blew up the way it did. It's been a bit lost in the sauce this season, but I'm 90% sure that Amazon paid a voiceover studio to provide voice acting in Ninja vs Gokudo. Not to mention that about a year ago, Crunchyroll was credibly accused of opening the mail of one of their regular voice actors and distributing its contents to staff.
Creative folks in this space have had to endure what can only be described as disrespectful treatment from these companies for years now, and I think both participants and consumers in this system are finally fed up.
And especially as a creative, it's endlessly frustrating to constantly hear "Oh, AI's going to get better" thrown around as if it's something we all have to accept—like death and taxes. Nah, I fully reject that premise. It's long been time to do away with that defeatist view.
Absolutely! Rejecting AI's implementation in creative efforts is both a moral one and, as this Amazon AI dub flub makes clear, a practical one. This dub was bad to the point of absurdity, and I'm so curious about how it ever saw the light of day!
Especially with how quickly some of the companies that actually own these anime were to disavow these AI dubs, I almost wonder if Amazon developed them in a test capacity and that they were never meant to be public-facing. This is pure speculation, but I can envision a scenario where the only reason we're having this conversation now is because of a miscommunication in proximity to a holiday at this sprawling company led to these going live when they shouldn't have.
That sounds rather possible, but it doesn't seem like they had permission to be futzing around like that to begin with. And if they did purposely go up, I could see some middle manager going, "Who cares, we're Amazon." Well, Joe Middle-Manager, the licensors care... The licensors care A LOT. Lucas, through our respective lines of work, we've both seen firsthand how protective licensors are of their properties. They want their brands to be represented in the best light possible and in accordance with their vision. None of these companies is keen on the image of their properties being sullied, and especially not by a hallucinating Microsoft Sam.
It's difficult to say for certain without knowing exactly how good an offer Amazon has been making these licensors, but there's a non-zero chance that Amazon just torpedoed their chances of working with major anime companies in the future. Which, in some ways, is a shame as Prime Video was quickly becoming the home for "prestige" anime releases like CITY the Animation, Sanda, and Gquuuuuux, which has the aforementioned Kyle McCarley voicing this latest iteration of Char!
As a non-AI-pilled person, it's baffling to me that Amazon would even think to test out AI dubs when they have the emails of some of the best voice actors working in the industry today! Furthermore, I can't even boycott the platform in a personal or professional capacity in response to this unethical action because a lot of great people are still doing some amazing work over there, and they deserve acknowledgement and celebration!
All I can do is tread water in this frustrating middle space and be prepared to call out the next company that tries to pull these kinds of shenanigans, and that's not a fun place to be!
Absolutely! If I weren't subscribed to these services out of professional obligation, I'd consider shaving off a couple myself. It's an endlessly frustrating reality... Without the oodles and oodles of talented people behind the scenes, we wouldn't have any of the works that entertain, shock, and move us—a good piece of art can change lives. So, what's the point of any of it if there isn't a human hand on the wheel? Honestly, the cartoons and comics I get to write about every week would mean absolutely nothing to me without the PEOPLE who make them happen.
You're entirely right, and maybe the best thing we can do to push back against AI's invasion of creative fields is to continue to promote works and performances that are deeply human, affecting, and have nothing to do with the technology. Hell, the meme format of "AI could never make this..." has already taken off and with economic indications suggesting that AI is just the latest tech fad in line with NFTs or the Blockchain, maybe we've already weathered the worst of this storm and what we're seeing now are just desperate attempts to find ANY application for this technology.
I suspect we'll be dealing with the aftershocks of the bubble pop for years to come (especially with the deteriorative effects of the technology on education and critical thinking skills), but the sustained pushback is giving me some hope. And while we're at it, let's not try to cast the word "SLOP" in a positive light at all. Keep it to how Merriam-Webster defines it. When it comes to our attention, I'd like to think we all deserve better than being seen as pigs champing at the bit to roll around in our own crap—the crap being hours and hours of AI garbage.
Dude, I will never understand the push to reclaim the word slop via cutesy, endearing terms like "friendslop" for social-focused video games. Have more self-respect, people! (Also, y'all should be playing better games.)
They used to have a genre name for games like Peak, it was "social games." Best to stick with that, gamesfolk.
Speaking of sticks, I'm also hopeful that some form of consequences can exist for companies like Amazon when they make these insulting decisions. It just came out that OceanVeil (who've come up repeatedly in this column for publishing OVAs and their willingness to host adult content) will simulcast the second season of the new, and decidedly not adult, anime Blue Miburo. To me, this implies that Japanese companies are already looking at alternatives to the current anime streaming landscape, and I'm growingly confident that someone will rise up to meet the occasion if our current corporate overlords keep acting recklessly.
And let's be honest, it's not like the Japanese side hasn't been looking at AI technology either. The aforementioned Necronomico situation is seemingly an example of that. But in the case of OceanVeil, they've seemingly proven they can be a trusted Western partner in our current streaming landscape. Even if Blue Miburo apparently isn't Shakespeare, this move leaves me hopeful that more companies will pop out of the woodwork and meet licensors on their level. Well, hopefully, before a salaryman in the sales department pitches ChatGPT to his boss as a solution for all their licensing needs.
You bring up a good point with Japan corporate leaders also having an infatuation with AI technology, except for a couple of smaller manga platforms that lean into AI localization. It seems to me that a lot of those folks are pretty nakedly trying to get in on this gold rush before the mines collapse. To the best of my knowledge, I haven't heard about much being upended in the Japanese entertainment space for the sake of a company going all in on AI.
I hope so, because we can only glean so much while on this side of the Pacific.
What we do know is that anime has found a way to endure, if not grow, globally for decades now. While it certainly has problems, the medium and industry have survived countless social and technological fads and even a few industry or economic collapses. I'm confident anime will survive the AI bubble and remain largely unchanged on the other side of it, and I can't wait to reach the point where this is all a quick memory that will make for a great retrospective column someday.
And perhaps in the meantime, we can use those setbacks as an opportunity to build a better anime industry for the talents who power it and the viewers who tune in every week.
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