This Week in Anime

The Great Amazon Dub Flub

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!

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!

This isn't the first instance of a distribution platform trying to pull a fast one on us in 2025. Back in October, you and I talked about Crunchyroll's subtitles suddenly dropping in quality. Also, last summer Crunchyroll was caught using ChatGPT to translate episodes of Necronomico.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.