If you religiously follow the release of new anime every season, then you’ve probably heard of The Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show. The show has made the news earlier in the week thanks to the subtitles that streaming platform Crunchyroll has attached to it. AI generation allegations are being thrown around, and it’s not helped by the specific mention of ChatGPT in the subs themselves.
Screenshots of such examples of bad subs have made their way around the internet, with a few easily found attached to one post on Bluesky and its replies. The post also highlights one particularly egregious example, with the subs starting with “ChatGPT said:’ in English as well as German subtitles. Other problematic examples which may or may not constitute AI use include “Is gameorver”, and “Translated by: Translator’s name” in the credits.
Beyond disappointed to find Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show's subs on @crunchyroll.com are blatantly and openly ChatGPT.This is not acceptable. How can we be expected to pay for a service that clearly doesn't care about the quality of its products?
— Pixel (@pixeldoesthings.bsky.social) 2025-07-01T18:10:35.620Z
On one hand, it’s difficult to ignore ChatGPT being explicitly seen in the subs. But on another, some of these are so bad that they are more reminiscent of more basic machine translations than the “work” of an LLM. Either way though, these are supposed to have gone through a human editor before being streamed out to subscribers, especially those who have paid US$8 (~RM33.76) a month to watch the show.
A little after the initial reports, a Crunchyroll spokesperson has told Engadget that the “AI-generated subs were employed by a third-party vendor, which is in violation of our agreement”. The streaming platform says that it is “investigating the matter and is working to rectify the error”, but stopped short of naming said third-party subtitling service.
Some have mentioned that this episode, pun intended, highlights the need for professional localisers for media of different languages. While it’s true that AI subs are definitely not at a level where they can be relied upon for this task just yet, humans aren’t that much better, regardless of whether that was caused by the lack of care, or an excess of guidelines to follow. Remember the whole discourse when Squid Game Season 1 was new?
Compounding this irony, and proving my point further, The Verge cites Crunchyroll president Rahul Parini as saying last year that using AI for subs has been something the company has considered. The idea is that, by having subs ready as close to the Japanese air time as possible, fans will have no reason to watch pirated versions. We’ve seen that it certainly hasn’t panned out that way, to say the least, and especially when compared to the best of fansubs.
