Despite public assurances that AI wouldn’t touch creative content, fans spot ChatGPT in Crunchyroll’s latest anime release.
Oops, ChatGPT Said That Out Loud
Crunchyroll has accidentally confirmed what fans have long suspected: AI is quietly translating anime—and now it’s left digital fingerprints.
On June 1, during the debut of Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show, a new series from Cygames, German-speaking viewers noticed something strange. Around the 19-minute mark, a subtitle reads:
“ChatGPT said: Wenn ich die Welt von hier an weiter genießen kann.”
Yes, they forgot to delete the ChatGPT prompt. The moment was quickly screencapped and posted to Bluesky by user Pixel, who wrote: “Beyond disappointed to find Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show’s subs on Crunchyroll are blatantly and openly ChatGPT.”
While the AI reference didn’t appear in subtitles for other languages, English captions were also suspiciously sloppy, with “Translated by: Translator’s name” putting a hilarious end to the episode.
So Much for “We Stand With Creators”
Just two months earlier, Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini told Forbes that the company was “not considering AI in the creative process.”
“We stand with creators in Japan and elsewhere striving to maintain authenticity in production,” Purini said, insisting that translators, voice actors, and other creatives were part of the storytelling process. AI, he said, would only be used for backend systems—recommendation engines, content discovery, personalization—not content itself.
This recent subtitle error? It very much touches the content itself.
A Growing Divide Between What’s Said and What’s Done
Purini’s Forbes interview painted Crunchyroll as a company balancing expansion and integrity. With new ad-supported tiers, FAST channels on platforms like Pluto, and ambitions to reach wider global audiences, Crunchyroll is chasing scale. That scale, however, comes with pressure—and shortcuts.
Using ChatGPT to speed up translations might be cheaper, but it’s also sloppier and alienating to fans who expect better from a platform once praised for its fan-first approach.
The silence from Crunchyroll so far doesn’t help. There’s still no official statement about how—or how often—AI is being used in localization.
One fan summarized the frustration best:
“Even using ChatGPT correctly was too much effort for them.”
Trust, Lost in Translation
For a company that claims to honor authenticity, this feels like more than a tech slip-up. It’s a breach of creative trust—especially for the real human translators who’ve spent decades bringing anime to international audiences with nuance, humor, and heart.
If AI is doing more than recommending your next show—and doing it poorly—fans deserve to know.
And maybe, Crunchyroll should be a little more careful next time…
before ChatGPT rats them out again.