{"id":321962,"date":"2025-11-30T07:42:06","date_gmt":"2025-11-30T07:42:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/321962\/"},"modified":"2025-11-30T07:42:06","modified_gmt":"2025-11-30T07:42:06","slug":"amazon-rolls-out-ai-generated-dub-of-well-loved-anime-series-banana-fish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/321962\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon rolls out AI-generated dub of well-loved anime series Banana Fish"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in March<\/a>, we reported that Amazon was embarking on a project that was going to be a bad idea that was going to make a lot of people mad, i.e., using artificial intelligence to generate dubbed voice tracks for anime series. Now, lo and behold, a whole bunch of people are exactly as mad as predicted, as the tech giant rolled out a new English dub of beloved anime series Banana Fish this month, completely generated by AI.<\/p>\n

Originally published in manga form starting in 1985,\u00a0Banana Fish\u00a0was both controversial and influential at the time for several aspects of its story of a noble gangster investigating a crime ring using the titular drug to control people\u2019s minds: Its violence, yes, but also its sexuality, whether that meant more explicit material happening in the criminal underworld, or the implied-so-hard-it\u2019s-one-shade-short-of-canon relationship between main character Ash Lynx and his friend Eiji Okumura. The series was given an anime adaptation in 2018, produced by Japanese studio MAPPA, and syndicated internationally by Amazon. Although it released with English subtitles, the series never got an English voice track\u2014until this week, when AI-generated Spanish and English versions of the show\u2019s dialogue were offered as \u201cbeta\u201d features for Prime Video viewers.<\/p>\n

The response to the news has included a lot of very strongly negative reactions, for a lot of very strongly obvious reasons: Animation fans take their dubs and subs extremely serious regardless, and having voice actors be put out of work while a mega-giant foists off a product that can\u2019t hope to match the richness of a fully voiced set of performances is an extra twist of the digital knife. Per\u00a0CBR<\/a>, at least one voice actor who\u2019s worked on a number of big-name projects for Amazon in the past\u2014Daman Mills, whose credits include\u00a0Rebuild Of Evangelion,\u00a0Dragon Ball Super, and\u00a0One Piece\u2014has stated on social media that he won\u2019t work for the company again if they keep the AI-generated dub up. (Meanwhile, we popped up the show\u2019s first episode for a minute just to make sure we weren\u2019t talking out of our asses on the quality of the resulting dub, and woof, is that some hideously lifeless robot talking. If the goal here was to completely drain a vibrant, fascinating show of all life in the most piss-the-fans-off-way possible, that\u2019s definitely one way to pull it off.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back in March, we reported that Amazon was embarking on a project that was going to be a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":321963,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":["post-321962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=321962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/321963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=321962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=321962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=321962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}