Remember when we could reliably count on the dub on a foreign film just having mediocre voice acting? There was a certain fun in that. But now they are making crappy English-language dubs using AI. Is truly nothing sacred? Via IGN, we learned that the anime series Banana Fish included an “AI beta” of an English dub included in the ‘Audio Languages’ option on Prime Video. Apparently, this AI dub for the anime series was laughably bad. And not in a fun way. Soon after, Banana Fish fans began posting clips on social media. You can listen to one of them down below:
It didn’t take long for the higher-ups at Prime Video to see the negative reaction online, and they quickly pulled the option from viewers. But because of the removal, there is now no English-language dub option at all. Oh well, it’s probably way better with just subtitles anyway. We don’t understand why they can’t just hire real actors, but these huge corporations will do just about anything to use AI as a way of not paying performers or artists, and this is just the latest example. At least fans were able to catch it right away, and put the streamer on blast.
An article on Forbes suggested that using AI would only save Prime Video about $50K. This is a mere drop in the bucket for a huge corporation like Amazon. Why not just pay actual voice actors? Especially as fans have been waiting for a proper dub for this series for years now. This is not the first time this has happened. Back in February, Prime Video dubbed the Portuguese of O Silêncio de Marcos Tremmer using AI. And not surprisingly, the result was equally terrible. Hopefully, embarrassments like this force some soul-searching from these companies in the immediate future.