Anime Fans Score Big Win as Crunchyroll U-Turns on Massively Unpopular A.I. Plan

Crunchyroll will always make me laugh when mentioned. Like a piracy website becomes legit, then corporate, and now it shit itself to death, what a life cycle!

Don't forget they also spun up their own 'production studio', and... it mostly produced basically the anime equivalent of lolcows in terms of their general reception and percieved quality, always overbudget and/or massively missing deadlines, never renewed for another season.

And then that was shut down within 3 years.

Oh right, and the union busting, also very cool.

In 2025, things staying the same as they are rather than getting worse counts as a 'big win' :|

You would think its hostage negotiations, boogieman sticking up companies to add A.I. or enshitify, so avoiding it is a perilous task and "big win".

Literally, just not changing anything is now considered good.

Anime fans lose big after Crunchyroll still in business.

It's just a delay to soften the blow. Few months they'll announce AI again.
- This is exactly what i predict will happen as well
What legal alternative to use? Netflix isn't an option, small selection in my country, VPN is a hassle I don't want to go through.
Crunchyroll actively makes anime worse.

Wait, is this why subs have been shitty and full of homophones for the last year?

I refuse to pay for crunchyroll again until they bring back comments and many other removed features.

They were better when they were a piracy site, price not withstanding
- I forgot about that lol
I actually hop around a few sites just to read comments on episodes so this is extremely valid.
literally unsubbed that day, I had kept my sub going for like 10 years, at that point I only kept it for the suprisingly fire comments

Just when dubs were getting to a point of not being too bad. Subtitles, especially CC have felt especially bad recently. I would rather wait an extra week or two for good sub or dub then have it done poorly or flat out butcherd with A.I..

Honestly that's because speeding up localizations by having the first pass be machine-made is not something that waited for GenAI to happen. It's been going on for a while using good old machine translators.

Now, Google Translate and similar tools have been reliant on machine learning for ages, people just weren't freaking out about it because "AI" hadn't gone viral. It's been weird to watch this sort of thing play out.

FWIW, if they are using the same loc workflow and genAI works better than good old machine translations for a first pass go ahead and do GenAI. From what I've seen casually it's not necessarily faster or more reliable, but I'm not working on loc professionally. Maybe that's what he means when he talks about using it in "backend processes"?
I've noticed it on non-anime as well. It isn't even good at doing English CC when the spoken language is English.

Yet another fucking cringe name to add to the modern corpo lexicon

Bytedance
Tencent
Xpeng
Crunchyroll

I don't even know that much about any of these companies or their practices but i just really dislike their names. I genuinely cringe when i read those words, lol

Most of those are based upon non-English language references.

Tencent - The company name in Mandarin 腾讯 or in téng xùn. When pronounced it sort of sounds like ten cent (but not really to my ear).

Xpeng - The company name in Mandarin is 小鹏汽车; or in pinyin: Xiǎopéng Qìchē. So for a romanization Xiǎopéng is shortened to Xpeng

Crunchyroll - Isn't Crunchyroll a type of a sushi roll?

Or to put it another way, if you're upset by these names, you should be equally upset with names like Starbucks, LA Fitness, or Del Taco.

Bytedance - Totally made up, I think for this for this one I think.