Crunchyroll, the massively popular anime streaming service and distributor, just got caught using obvious AI slop in its subtitles.
The slipup was made in the premiere episode of a new series called "Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show" — and trust us, there's no guesswork involved in sniffing out the AI here.
Around the 19:12 mark, the show's German subtitles feature a big fat "ChatGPT said:" jammed into the dialog. A classic, lazy error. (We double checked, and it's still there as of this morning.)
The fans who spotted this shoddy work didn't hold back in expressing their disappointment.
"This is not acceptable," wrote a user on Bluesky who was among the first to flag the AI usage. "How can we be expected to pay for a service that clearly doesn't care about the quality of its products?"
Not just the German subs btw lol pic.twitter.com/25kUWtXexP — CheeseGX (@CheeseGX_) July 1, 2025
This might not come as a surprise to astute anime fans who've long complained about the quality of some of the service's subtitles. In late 2023, Crunchyroll infamously was forced to take down the first episode of the series "The Yuzuki Family's Four Sons" after the subs turned out to be outrageously bad. Errors ranging from random punctuation to straight up getting a character's name wrong raised the specter of machine translation.
Recently, some fans have found that the errors typically arise from the English closed captions — designed to be watched with the English dub — which show telltale signs of automation in how the text would incorrectly transcribe names or refer to characters that don't exist.
Pinning the blame for this latest incident is a bit tricky, though, since translations come from a variety of sources — sometimes from the production company, or the show's license holder, or from Crunchyroll's team.
Regardless, it won't help Crunchyroll's case that it's openly flirted with — and flip-flopped on — AI for some time now.
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