Companies are being forced to learn the same lesson time and time again in the AI bubble era: the backlash that almost stops them from doing dumb things with generative AI privately? It’s going to be just as bad, if not worse, when they inevitably start doing them publicly.
Amazon is simply the latest to find out that being loudly yelled at is not a fun time. This past weekend, the company’s Prime Video streamer faced a swath of public furor when it started quietly rolling out a beta program that gave several anime films and series available on the platform generated artificial dubs in both English and Spanish. Aside from generally being a gross undermining of actual human performers and just the latest ammo in elitist culture wars about the quality of dubbed anime versus the subtitled originals, the dubs were united by a singular thing: they all sucked ass.
Thankfully, whether it was the fact they sucked ass or Prime Video got very tired of being yelled at by anime fans and voice actors alike (including Evangelion dub actor Daman Mills, who went viral for lambasting the company that had previously hired him to dub the role of Kaworu Nagisa for the mecha series’ rebuild movie saga), someone at the streamer listened. Several of the English language AI dubs for anime such as Banana Fish, No Game No Life: Zero, and more have now been removed, although the Spanish language equivalents still remain on several titles as of writing.
io9 has reached out to Amazon for comment on the rollout and sudden removal of the AI dubs and will update this post when and if we hear back.
Amazon’s public embarrassment is the latest in a line of studios fretting over facing the consequences for injecting their projects with AI slop. Over the summer, a report from the Wall Street Journal alleged that Disney killed several attempts to integrate generative AI into the production of both Tron: Ares and the live-action Moana remake, only to back away due to a combination of copyright ownership concerns and fear of a public relations nightmare should the AI usage make it to public viewing.
In spite of that concern, Disney went on to announce that it was planning to heavily integrate generative AI features into its own streaming platform, Disney+, with CEO Bob Iger telling shareholders recently that it was working on plans that would allow users to be able to create their own generative AI content with Disney characters directly on the streamer. Maybe they should look over Prime Video’s shoulder and take the hint before that ever goes beyond the planning stages?
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