When a company has a monopoly and no signs of competition applying pressure on its service, that company starts to get complacent and ends up making outright questionable decisions. In shorter terms, the company gets arrogant, resulting in public backlash. Crunchyroll is the latest example of this tried and true predicament but this time with a touch of Chat GPT.
A year ago, Crunchyroll’s CEO Rahul Purini announced AI as an area to expand its anime content. In Addition, he also publicly welcomed it as a potential workflow for their operations. This was possibly regarding animation, voice acting, writing, and more. Obviously, the anime community is against this practice. The fact that the company had thoughts of replacing employees with AI bots is concerning. It’s clear that Crunchyroll believed AI to be more affordable than paying its employees.
The public backlash had them reconsidering their options, leaving Purini to
dial back on his previous statements. The CEO mentioned that the company is now using AIto improve recommendations and personalization. A big move from Crunchyroll’s stance on using AI for closed captioning and subtitles.
All in all, the anime community definitely made the right call in criticizing the blatant use of AI. Crunchyroll is realizing that they made a mistake but that does not mean the idea is going to waste. When the attention is not on them and on other companies, Crunchyroll will most likely do this plan in some shape or form in the future. It’s just a matter of when that might occur.
