Summary
Crunchyroll is testing AI for user personalization and subtitle translation, which has raised alarm bells in the community. Fans have expressed concerns about AI’s accuracy with subtitles, as evidenced by recent translation errors. AI is beneficial in speeding up translation but can lack cultural understanding and harm the careers of translators working in the industry.
Popular anime streaming platform, Crunchyrollrecently announced plans to begin testing artificial intelligence technology on the platform, with mixed reactions from fans. Over the past few years, artificial intelligence technology has developed rapidly, spreading to countless different industries quite quickly. Now, it seems like AI is slowly making its way into the anime industry as well.
This use of AI will include Helps translate subtitles from Japanese to other languages, as well as general AI technologies to directly help users choose titles to view and navigate the platform. Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini confirmed the intention and explained the reasons behind the choice.
He claims that artificial intelligence will benefit the platform and overall user experience by “optimizing” different parts of the experience, including personalizing each user and user experience. overall experience when using the website. One of the biggest advantages Purini lists is using AI to translate subtitles much faster, allows earlier release dates for popular anime.
Crunchyroll’s use of AI could mean faster release dates and better user experiences
The platform plans to test AI in areas such as user personalization and subtitle translation
The AI technology is still in beta for Crunchyroll, but fans have expressed some concerns. One of the main hesitations associated with this use of AI is How will it affect the accuracy of the subtitles? Translating subtitles can be quite a tedious task, requiring meticulous attention and a thorough understanding of both the language being translated and the language being translated into. Artificial intelligence also cannot possess the cultural knowledge and understanding that humans can, so this can lead to errors when translating AI-generated subtitles.
Unfortunately, Crunchyroll has had to deal with some mistranslated or confusing subtitles recently. The subtitles for The Yuzuki Family’s Four Sons released in October 2023 were mistranslated, causing Crunchyroll to take down the episode and fix the error with new subtitles. Several notable errors also appeared in the recently released Jujutsu Kaisen season 2 episodes, including the mistranslation of Cursed King Sukuna’s domain name, as well as many Cursed Techniques. All these errors were also quickly fixed, but tThese cases show how difficult and complicated the work of translation is into a completely different language possible.
The negatives of using AI for translation may outweigh the positives
In nuanced work like translating subtitles, AI must be used with extreme care
Artificial intelligence has interesting implications and could benefit the anime industry. However, it is important to be aware of potential limitations and approach the technology carefully. AI could prove very useful in speeding up the translation process, but it cultural differences, complex sentence structures, and other situations that require the help of a translator may not be understood. Crunchyroll’s AI is currently only in beta and will likely be perfected before it goes live, but it will be interesting to see how the technology changes the user experience.
Source: Anime News Network