Crunchyroll accidentally confirmed it uses ChatGPT for subtitles
Crunchyroll viewers are not happy after ChatGPT was discovered in one of its German subtitles.
Pretty obvious if you're used any recently but confirmation is nice. Their closed captions are generally pretty terrible as well.
Although it seems likely that Crunchyroll uses an LLM for translation in some way, I wouldn't call that "confirmed" since that might be the result of an individual translator using it.
The actions of an employee, when reviewed and released by a company, are the actions of that company. A company is just the sum of its employees' actions.
Also, LLM have been there for a while. So there are a few possible situations
So yeah, whatever the situation, it's on Crunchyroll.
How are subtitles created usually? Are they provided by the source material team, some professional third party that manually transcribes the video, or just fans doing it for free?
See that’s the kicker, for the longest time it was basically all fan translated subtitles, and only recently have payed for translation become the norm.
So it’s really quite pathetic for them to try and save a few bucks by replacing a proper translator with a LLM, given that there are still plenty of passionate fans who would have done it for free. Especially given that translating between Japanese and English in a cultural context heavy situation is something these LLMs are really bad at.
given that there are still plenty of passionate fans who would have done it for free
I'd imagine this is a non-starter from a corporate standpoint. I know if I were in charge I'd be terrified of the idea of just trusting community-submitted subtitles to not have random slurs or something inserted. That said I still think it would be super cool if they'd let people source and use their own subtitle files; I now it's possible because I have a tampermonkey script that lets me do just that.
In terms of anime fansubs, it's normally just great folks in the community. Some got hired by studios. But the studio is meant to provide the subs.
It seems that they have, or at least had in 2023, internal teams that handled the translations. https://www.crunchyroll.com/news/interviews/2023/9/30/international-translation-day-2023
I maintain my own media library and I ensure every file has English and German subtitles. There are a variety of ways to source srt files but when all else fails a machine with enough compute can transcribe video files using open source whisper. After I generate an English srt file from the video I send it to OpenAI to create the German translation.
As someone who is able to speak Japanese, I'd notice the drop in quality of translation almost instantly.
I never turn on subs anyway when I watch my anime though.
I have to since my partner doesn't speak Japanese, but half the time I end up having to correct lines for them once or twice, to make things make sense. The non-egregious stuff I don't even bother with. It's crazy how amateurish some of the mistakes are, or even what are clearly choices to omit entire sentences, for no reason.
おい、ゆうじ君、海行こうぜ
"Hi Yuji!"
君
As someone who learns japanese. Is that a kanji for a honorific? probably kun? ゆうじ is the name, although weird that it is written in hiragana I guess... But I fail at this one 海行こうぜ
The first Kanji has the one for mother as part of it I think... And the second one is pronounced it 'i' so ...iikouze ? Let's go somewhere?
I feel like this is a reasonable use of chat gpt.
For YouTube tutorial videos I have no issue with relying on GPT, but I think it's important to recognize that the translation of art is art. I don't feel good about the idea of something without a soul or perspective interpolating a work of art from one culture and language into another that might be wildly different from where it started.
That all said, I think Crunchyroll and anyone else using AI art without disclosing it absolutely should be honest about it.
Both translation and subtitles have highly efficient tooling when in the hands of a professional. Translators nowadays use a mix and will build up a dynamic database as they go through a corpus that needs coherence. What's bad in this instance is not the usage of some AI, but of a badly adapted AI and ultimately of mediocre results which gives an amateurish impression.
