Recent reports have announced that Crunchyroll, the largest anime streaming service, will be replacing Aegisub with Israeli Software, OOONA, to produce subtitles more efficiently. Anime fans across the world are disappointed with this collaboration due to Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians (via a report by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry).

Crunchyroll is also ignoring the needs of groups who require Closed Captions to understand the scenes better. They are isolating a large chunk of their audience in favor of AI-based subtitling, which defeats the point of a streaming service. Overall, this hasn’t been a great year for Crunchyroll, and this won’t be the end of it.

  • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
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    19 hours ago

    Fansubs continue being superior to professional subs. Ai subs will just bring the industry down completely.

  • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de
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    2 days ago

    Creates bad AI subtitles

    Ignores customer needs

    Changes business to genocidal regime

    “Why does everyone hate us?? Must be the damn pirates! :<”

  • quickenparalysespunk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 days ago

    crunchy was criminal since the get go. their earliest releases were unauthorized reposts of fansubs, for which they already charged subscription fees!

    so they started their existence by pirating while making money through stealing fansubbers’ (volunteer btw) work.

  • Michael@slrpnk.net
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    2 days ago

    From the mass employee layoffs to being caught using ChatGPT for subtitles

    So caught using ChatGPT and then doubling down on using AI for subtitles in the worst possible way? Wow…

    People pay for an anime streaming service to do better than fan-based translations, not worse.

  • Bobo The Great@startrek.website
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    2 days ago

    This is just weird. Why make these changes? Customers don’t want it, the company doesn’t profit and they actually lost money and reputation by doing this and not backtracking. Who is benefiting from this? It looks like a perfect lose-lose situation

    • k_rol@lemmy.ca
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      2 days ago

      … Who is benefiting from this?

      Probably the MBA executives. They have bonuses if it works and they have bonuses if it doesn’t work and they leave their contract early. MBAs don’t understand the product-customer relationship it seems.

      • Banzai51@midwest.social
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        2 days ago

        Too many MBAs and execs are too focused on the shareholder. They forget you have to take care of the customer first. It doesn’t help we have insane institutional shareholders who reward execs for punishing the customer. It’s a big reason Enshittification is such a big problem today.