Just days after fans began to notice the use of AI-generated English dubs for popular anime titles Banana Fish and No Game, No Life Zero, Amazon Prime Video has quietly removed the AI generated English dubs from both. Banana Fish and Vinland Saga both have an AI generated Spanish dub still available on Prime Video as of the time of this article’s publication. Another less popular series, pet, still has an AI-generated English dub. It is possible those will soon be removed as well. This change to the audio options offered for these series comes as Amazon / Prime Video was continuously lambasted over the last several days for making use of AI to produce anime dubs rather than, in the case of shows like Banana Fish, which have no official English dub, hiring human actors and producing a dub.
Multiple voice actors have spoken out against the use of AI to dub anime, notably voice actor Daman Mills, who is well known for voicing Frieza in Dragon Ball Super. Mills explained that anime is more popular now than ever and that the use of AI for dubbing threatens the livelihood of the voice actors who serve as partial foundation to that popularity.
Mills would go on to post that he was cancelling his Amazon Prime subscription, which other voice actors, including Damien Haas, would join him in doing. Multiple fans, engaging with the many tweets from voice actors, called for boycotts of Amazon and Prime Video, especially as Black Friday occurred this past week and Cyber Monday occurs today.
As previously reported, Amazon began to launch artificial intelligence-aided dubbing for select movies and shows offered on its Prime streaming service earlier this year. This caused some degree of localized pockets of outrage, but the AI dub of a show as beloved as Banana Fish was a clear tipping point for fans. While the quality of the AI dubbing is quite poor, this was only a component of the issue. The implications on general creativity in the space and the labor of voice actors are much more important than quality, which may eventually improve for AI generated voice acting.
From the looks of things, it seems the backlash was either effective or enough of a noise that Amazon decided that the downsides of keeping the AI-generated English dubs for these titles outweighed the likely cost savings of using AI instead of hiring human voice actors and a studio to do a traditional (read: human) dub. I have yet to see an official statement from Amazon Prime Video regarding the decision to use the AI dubs or the backlash, but for now it looks like some of your favorite anime are (one again) spared from the maw of AI.
© 吉田秋生・小学館／Project BANANA FISH
Participate In Discussions