With AI becoming more prevalent than ever, its use has become more widespread. With art and music platforms being riddled with AI generated content, it’s becoming more of an issue, especially in TV shows.
Sometimes in shows, there may be a barrier between the content on screen and the audience consuming it, whereas it may be due to a language barrier or deafness. Usually this is when subtitles come in as they can solve these barriers for those watching or even provide a modicum of convenience as it helps people to understand what certain characters are saying in certain scenes that may have a multitude of things occurring that may drown out the dialogue. However, the implementation of AI may sometimes damage the quality of these subtitles.
The worst offender that immediately comes to mind is Sony’s Crunchyroll, which specializes in anime. Crunchyroll for a while has been a controversial streaming service with how it handles its translations and it seems they aren’t above lazily using ai and pasting whatever gets generated into the captions. According to PC World, “viewers reportedly saw the phrase ‘ChatGPT said,’ in the German subtitles for ‘Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show.’ Both the English and German captions have been criticized for being sloppy and difficult to understand” and that “Crunchyroll has been testing AI subtitles to release episodes more quickly.” This method of translation comes across as lazy and lacking in quality as it feels like an attempt to get around having to pay real translators while having artificial intelligence do it instead.
It seems other streaming services are preparing to start using AI for their shows as well, not just for captions, as according to Tech Crunch, “Netflix said that it has started using AI in movies and shows it produces” and that “the platform had ‘the very first GenAI final footage to appear on screen’ in an Argentine show called ‘El Eternauta.’” It seems AI isn’t at its peak just yet, but it’s worrying to think about how widespread it will be soon and how many jobs it may end up replacing.
