If you watched the English-dubbed version of one of several popular anime on Amazon Prime Video lately, like \u201cBanana Fish,\u201d and \u201cNo Game, No Life,\u201d you may have noticed something strange. The voices were generic, unexpressive, and at times robotic, completely disconnected from the action unfolding on screen. Some lines even sounded a little glitchy. In a word: it was a disaster.<\/p>\n
The embarrassing English voices it turned out, were AI-generated. An entourage of actors didn\u2019t sit down in a room somewhere recording take after take to bring these characters to life; instead the voice lines were automatically stitched together using what\u2019s essentially glorified text-to-speech software, with predictably horrendous results.<\/p>\n
Fans were furious<\/a>. And the fallout on social media quickly became so vociferous that Amazon has now quietly pulled the AI dubs from several of the shows, including \u201cBanana Fish.\u201d The AI-generated Spanish dub for \u201cBanana Fish\u201d and \u201cVinland Saga,\u201d however, are still available, Anime Corner noted<\/a>.<\/p>\n But the damage was done. Voice actors, who have been at the forefront of criticizing AI\u2019s encroachment into entertainment industries, torched Amazon<\/a> for the move.<\/p>\n \u201cAmazon\u2019s choice to use AI to dub Banana Fish is a massive insult to us as performers. AI continues to threaten livelihoods of performers in EVERY language (yes even Japanese performers who are also incredibly vocal on this topic),\u201d Daman Mills, a voice actor known for his work in anime, wrote in a widely shared tweet<\/a>.<\/p>\n The rollout appears to have taken place over the holiday weekend, without any official announcement from Amazon. In March, the company teased that it would start testing a new \u201cAI-aided\u201d dubbing feature<\/a> across a small selection of movies in English and Latin American Spanish, but made no mention of anime at the time.<\/p>\n The e-commerce giant has been obsessed with stuffing AI features into its streaming service. Last year, it began showing users AI-generated recaps<\/a> for TV shows and released another AI tool to recommend you movies based on how similar their plots and character arcs were to your favorite films. It\u2019s also turned a blind eye to clearly AI-generated movie descriptions<\/a> and posters<\/a> polluting the platform.<\/p>\n The debacle also comes not long after the popular anime streaming service Crunchryoll was embroiled in an AI controversy of its own, when fans noticed that some subtitles were blatantly AI-generated<\/a>. The giveaway, in at least one case, was a line that began with \u201cChatGPT said.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n For fans of \u201cBanana Fish\u201d in particular, the insult rendered by this latest AI job was grievous. They had been waiting years for an English dub of the show, which originally ran in 2018. The show itself was a long-awaited adaptation of a classic manga that wrapped up in 1994. In a sense, an English dub was a moment decades in the making \u2014 all to be spoiled by shoddy AI.<\/p>\n