The Anime AI Closed Captioning Situation Is Crazy

Closed captioning has been around since the 70s with the express purpose of creating subtitles as a “transcription or translation of the dialogue when sound is available but not understood” by the viewer, whether sound is muted, drowned out by ambient noise, or the user is deaf or hard of hearing. Closed captions by and large are all but essential in today’s media landscape, either because actors whisper or a show’s dynamic range is screwy. A lot of people watch TV with subtitles these days, including English-speaking anime fans. Unfortunately for those anime fans, the closed captioning for Crunchyroll shows over the past couple of years has severely declined in quality, and it looks like it's going to become an even bigger problem for how we watch anime industry-wide. 

Crunchyroll fails to meet industry standards for Closed Captioning - Anime Feminist

Despite having a near-complete monopoly on the anime streaming industry in 2024, Crunchyroll does not offer closed captioning for the majority of its English dubs.

Anime FeministVrai Kaiser

These issues were first brought to light by Anime Feminist back in 2024, where writer Vrai Kaiser wrote that in the wake of Crunchyroll’s huge merger with Funimation for $143 million, the anime streamer didn’t meet the industry standard for closed captioning with its English-dubbed shows. In the piece, Kaiser noted that outside of a few Toonami shows like Attack on Titan and My Hero Academia, most shows don’t have closed captioning. It was an issue Funimation remedied back in the day to ensure all of its English-dubbed shows had closed captioning options in accordance with the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CCVAA), but that change didn’t carry over when Crunchyroll merged Funimation’s library into its own in 2022—a merger that led to fan outrage over losing digital anime content they once owned on Funimation. 

Since then, Kaiser reported that as of February 2024, a Crunchyroll spokesperson said it was still working to add more closed captions to its catalog. 

At worst, Crunchyroll’s subtitling creates the annoying scenario where you’re given two options: English and English CC. The first option translates Japanese text written within the show, where things like text messages, signage, and the like are translated in concert with dialogue—something that’s especially helpful for readers who are either curious or need to know all the fucking rules in Jujutsu Kaisen Culling Game Part 1. 

The latter, in theory, provides viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing with captions that convey information about background noise and speaker changes within a show. But more often than not, Crunchyroll’s closed captioning, alongside its subtitling as of late, has become a far cry from what the company used to offer. This is a result of the popularity of anime rising exponentially. Crunchyroll as a company has an insatiable need to beef up the quantity of its shows in its streaming catalogue without giving a damn about the quality of its localizations. While Crunchyroll has claimed it doesn’t use AI for its subtitles or closed captions, the kinds of errors being made in these captions have made viewers suspicious. Especially, because, well, they have been caught red handed before.

Crunchyroll’s first AI incident saw users catch the German subtitles for the show Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show with the words ChatGPT explicitly written in its subtitling. Speaking with Aftermath, a spokesperson provided a statement saying the “AI-generated subtitles were employed by a third-party vendor, which is in violation of our agreement.” After that, the show’s German subtitles no longer include the ChatGPT prefix, according to Anime News Network. However, that hasn’t stopped the anime from having a bit of a tarnished reputation as the “AI” show online in the wake of its subtitling incident. 

The second time was last November, in a report from Anime Corner, where former Fakku developer Daiz posted on Twitter that Crunchyroll appeared to have used AI in the closed captioning for the sixth episode of the show, The Banished Court Magician Aims to Become the Strongest. Upon further digging from Daiz, they discovered that the episode’s screwy closed captions were because Crunchyroll was working with Ollang, a San Francisco-based company that, you guessed it, touts its usage of AI to get the job done using buzzy corpo speak like “optional human-in-the-loop” and “localization, reimagined for the modern enterprise.” 

Mind you, Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini told Forbes last April, “We are not considering AI in the creative process, including our voice actors. We consider them to be creators because they are contributing to the story and plot with their voice.” 

Forbes also noted that Purini added that they are, however, looking at AI to improve back-end systems and enhance the customer experience through features such as discoverability, recommendations, and personalization, rather than touching the shows themselves.

The most recent example came from the folks in the Highlight Reel Discord (Correction, 1/27/26, 3:47pm--This story initially misstated which Discord the example was from). In the third episode of No Gun No Life, an anime about a detective with a gun for a head, eagle-eyed viewers pointed out some really weird closed captions. In this scene, two characters approach the gun-headed detective, with one of them saying, “So you’re Juzo, the Resolver?” However, with the English closed captioning on for the show, the pair instead approach him saying, “So your Jews are resolver?” A slip-up, sure. But given that Crunchyroll has been caught using AI for its captions before, it has set a precedent for fans to believe any mistranslation in their closed captioning must be due to AI. Aftermath reached out to Crunchyroll for comment about its closed captioning and whether AI is involved in the process.

There have been instances where bullying has convinced companies like Amazon to reverse its AI initiatives, such as abysmal AI dubbing. But companies tend to follow the leader, and one of Crunchyroll’s major competitors in the anime market, Netflix, has had no qualms about publicly stating that they will use AI in subtitles.