As the love affair between generative AI and business executives continues, Amazon delivered another preview of the artless future these suits seem to be salivating for: over the weekend, Prime Video uploaded AI-generated English and Spanish-language dubbing for the anime Banana Fish, No Game No Life 0, and Vinland Saga.
Unsurprisingly, they sounded positively awful. The English-language “voice acting” in particular had the kind of flat intonation and robotic delivery that could easily outdo the most wooden of Razzie winners, robbing all dialogue of its dramatic heft—the word “BETA” is slapped under the AI menu option like a tacit admission that the feature is not very good. The people pushing this rollout clearly didn’t understand or care about just how lifeless it sounds, as if the script were fed into a basic text-to-speech reader with no sense of intonation or timing. The response on social media was appropriately brutal, and even the grok-lovers of the world largely sat this losing battle out.
And while there is some warped logic to subjecting Banana Fish and No Game No Life 0 to this treatment, given their lack of existing English dubs, this generally bad choice made even less sense for Vinland Saga. On top of sullying one of the best anime in recent memory, this move was particularly egregious because the show already has not one but two dub tracks that Amazon, a $2.5 trillion corporation, is apparently too cheap to license.
Thankfully, the company did eventually budge. In response to the backlash, it took down its English-language dubs for the previously mentioned anime earlier today, but left the similarly bad Spanish-language ones up. It seems a bit of a short-term victory; it’s probably fair to assume Amazon is going back to the drawing board to try and make the feature work “better” rather than backing away from AI because of its significant environmental impact, ethical concerns around labor, and the widespread theft needed to make it work.
This isn’t the first time Amazon has used AI dubbing, either. Back in March, it announced that 12 licensed titles without English or Latin American Spanish dubs would be getting the robo-voice treatment, such as El Cid: La Leyenda, which is still using its English language AI-assisted dub. The company attempted to justify the move by pointing out that these films and shows wouldn’t have dubs otherwise, which again is a flimsy excuse considering it’s sitting on a pile of gold.
While at first glance these choices seem entirely tied to the ongoing AI bubble and the out-of-control decisions tech companies are making in its wake, these events unfortunately also connect to more longstanding issues around how English-language voice actors for anime (and other media) have been treated.
Back in 2022, the anime streaming service Crunchyroll refused to renew its contract with Kyle McCarley, who voiced the main character in the popular (and, incidentally, very good) series Mob Psycho 100. The reason? He was a member of SAG-AFTRA. For those unaware, the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) is the main labor union for film and TV actors in the U.S., representing over 160,000 performers, including voice actors. Through collective bargaining, it helps secure better wages and working conditions for its members (because that’s how unions work).
After merging with Funimation at the behest of its new parent company, Sony, Crunchyroll continued its hard anti-union stance to the point that it opted not to work with McCarley, even though it would be paying him less under the union contract than under the one it had offered him. We can only speculate here, as Crunchyroll has never stated why it’s so anti-union, but, as with most cases of union busting, it’s probably because it fears losing absolute control over its employees and wants to avoid “wage cuts” (aka, less plundering) for those at the top of the organizational chart. While Netflix works exclusively with SAG-AFTRA members for its dubs, and Aniplex (which is also owned by Sony) sometimes works with union members, Crunchyroll leadership remains dead set against it.
Looking at the broader picture of how anime voice actors have been treated makes it all the more clear why union representation is a must. For instance, voice actor Anairis Quiñones revealed on social media that she was paid a flat rate of only $150 with no royalties for her performance as Rika Orimoto in Jujutsu Kaisen 0. For context, Jujutsu Kaisen 0 is a film prequel to one of the biggest ongoing anime series. The movie raked in over $191 million worldwide and over $34 million domestically. On top of this, Rika is one of the film’s primary characters. Crunchyroll handled the North American release of the film, which came out around the same time it was refusing to work with Kyle McCarley because he was a union member.
This low pay isn’t a one-off, and many voice actors have described similar circumstances. Performers frequently rely on appearances at conventions to make ends meet, with voice actor Ben Diskin stating in an interview with In These Times that it’s like being “a waiter in a restaurant who relies on tips,” and that this “transfers the responsibility of paying the actors from the people who actually make money off of these projects to the fans,” which “is really unfair.”
Even setting aside the various moral reasons for why people should be appropriately compensated for their work, poor working conditions for voice actors often result in poor output. Bad pay forces people into other lines of work, draining the talent pool while making it hard for existing talent to hone their skills.
This is a big deal because no matter where someone stands on the never-ending anime nerd debate of “subs vs. dubs,” the reality is that a large percentage of audiences would like to watch TV in their native language; many English speakers simply won’t watch a show if they have to read subtitles, which is a big part of why most of the most popular series are dubbed. Because of this, dubbing is one of the first potential barriers for general audiences getting into anime, with good performances convincing viewers of a character’s motivations to pull them into the world, while bad ones take them out of it. Frankly, it takes skilled line readings to get around what’s been lost in translation from the original script or to sell some of the aggressively earnest dialogue found in many of these shows.
Sure, Amazon has backed away from AI dubbing for now, but between poor compensation and anti-union sentiment, North American anime localizations have consistently demonstrated how little they value the important work that voice actors do, making it fair to assume that we haven’t seen the last of these abominable AI “performances.”
While the AI protections in SAG-AFTRA contracts may discourage Netflix and Aniplex in the short term, Amazon is still using AI dubbing for certain shows in languages other than English. YouTube has deployed a similarly nightmarish AI interpreter that is particularly good at delivering jump scares when its uncanny voice suddenly begins translating non-English language videos without prompting. Meanwhile, although Crunchyroll CEO Rahul Purini walked back how much the company would use AI in the “creative process” following backlash, it seems plausible that the industry at large is simply waiting until the technology potentially improves or becomes less controversial before pursuing it more wholeheartedly.
Still, there’s a bright side to this seemingly dismal situation: Amazon made a damn convincing argument for why this technology doesn’t work for voice acting. What better illustration of gen AI’s empty facsimile of humanity than a performance with all the soul of an answering machine? At least for now, few seem convinced this is a good idea except those at the top of the corporate hierarchy. Let’s hope it stays that way, because if general audiences accept this change, then the battle is truly lost.
