Crunchyroll, the popular anime streaming platform, is betting on artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up the subtitle process.
In a recent interview on The Verge’s Decode podcast, Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini revealed the company’s experimentation with synthetic AI to create subtitles and closed captions.
This strategic move aims to deliver multilingual subtitles more quickly, aligning releases more closely with original airdates in Japan.
“AI is something that we look at across many workflows across the organization,” Purini explains. “Currently, a key area we are testing is subtitles and closed captioning. We wanted to improve our process so we could produce subtitles in various languages faster, allowing for a launch as close to the Japanese release as possible.”
AI will help fight piracy
Purini hopes that AI-Powered Translations will help Crunchyroll tackle a key industry challenge: piracy.
Fans often turn to pirated content because it has fan-made subtitles available much earlier than the official release. By significantly reducing wait times for officially subtitled episodes, Crunchyroll aims to reduce the appeal of pirated content.
This isn’t Crunchyroll’s first foray into AI-assisted translation. In October 2023, the first episode of The Four Sons of the Yuzuki Family appeared to have machine-translated subtitles. The resulting inaccuracies drew criticism from fans, causing Crunchyroll to remove the episode.
The increasing use of AI in creative fields is not surprising, especially after the release of advanced language models such as ChatGPT 3.0. As AI technology continues to develop, it’s likely that fans will see more and more AI involvement in the world of anime.
Also read: World’s first AI-drawn manga released
Source: The Verge
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