Crunchyroll's CEO says its artificial intelligence will not touch anime content, despite stating last year that the streamer was 'very focused' on testing AI for subtitling and closed captioning purposes.
Crunchyroll CEO Rahul Purini recently told Forbesin a new interview, "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 added that Crunchyroll stands with creators "striving to maintain authenticity in production" and will use AI and machine learning for its "back-end systems to improve content discoverability, recommendations, and personalization, but only as ways to improve the customer experience and not touching on the content itself."
There was a visceral reaction on social media to the reports at the time amid persistently strong views among fans about AI in the anime industry in general, such as AI-generated Studio Ghibli art prompting debates over copyright infringement. Meanwhile, other streaming services with notable anime catalogs have announced or stepped up plans for AI within their services. Amazon's Prime Video has recently rolled out an AI dubbing pilot program for series that "would not have been dubbed otherwise."
https://www.cbr.com/crunchyroll-demon-slayer-anime-specials-streaming-release/
Meanwhile, Netflix is supporting the Go-with-the-Flow generative AIproject, whose research paper cites its "potential to revolutionize creative industries such as filmmaking and animation." Furthermore, a recent Netflix job postingindicated it's looking for scientists with "established track records in generative speech technologies to develop algorithms that power high-quality localization at scale." The streamer also collaborated on an anime in 2023 featuring AI-generated backgrounds. It's worth noting that it just rolled out an AI search engine this week, per bloomberg.
Source: Anime Fans Score Big Win as Crunchyroll U-Turns on Massively Unpopular A.I. Plan
Crunchyroll CEO Rahul Purini recently told Forbesin a new interview, "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 added that Crunchyroll stands with creators "striving to maintain authenticity in production" and will use AI and machine learning for its "back-end systems to improve content discoverability, recommendations, and personalization, but only as ways to improve the customer experience and not touching on the content itself."
Crunchyroll to Use AI in Anime for 'Back-End Systems' Solely to 'Improve Customer Experience
With AI reserved for backend systems and not the anime itself, this seemingly marks a U-turn from Purini's comments last year to The Verge when he said, "A.I. is definitely something we think about at a lot of different workflows in the organization," adding that "one of the areas we're very focused on testing is subtitling and our closed captioning where we go from speech to text. 'How do we improve and optimize our processes where we can get the subtitles done in various languages across the world faster so that we can launch as close to the Japanese release as possible?' So that's definitely an area that we're focused on."There was a visceral reaction on social media to the reports at the time amid persistently strong views among fans about AI in the anime industry in general, such as AI-generated Studio Ghibli art prompting debates over copyright infringement. Meanwhile, other streaming services with notable anime catalogs have announced or stepped up plans for AI within their services. Amazon's Prime Video has recently rolled out an AI dubbing pilot program for series that "would not have been dubbed otherwise."
https://www.cbr.com/crunchyroll-demon-slayer-anime-specials-streaming-release/
Meanwhile, Netflix is supporting the Go-with-the-Flow generative AIproject, whose research paper cites its "potential to revolutionize creative industries such as filmmaking and animation." Furthermore, a recent Netflix job postingindicated it's looking for scientists with "established track records in generative speech technologies to develop algorithms that power high-quality localization at scale." The streamer also collaborated on an anime in 2023 featuring AI-generated backgrounds. It's worth noting that it just rolled out an AI search engine this week, per bloomberg.
Source: Anime Fans Score Big Win as Crunchyroll U-Turns on Massively Unpopular A.I. Plan
