Recent reports have announced that Crunchyroll, the largest anime streaming service, will be replacing Aegisub with Israeli Software, OOONA, to produce subtitles more efficiently. Anime fans across the world are disappointed with this collaboration due to Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians (via a report by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry).
Crunchyroll is also ignoring the needs of groups who require Closed Captions to understand the scenes better. They are isolating a large chunk of their audience in favor of AI-based subtitling, which defeats the point of a streaming service. Overall, this hasn’t been a great year for Crunchyroll, and this won’t be the end of it.
I’m so super mega serious. Seriously. I’ll try it more basic, but deadly serious:
"What going on?
Me not understand.
Why hate thing? Is cause ai, or cause Israeli, both? Something else?
Why do I care who is hitting the keyboard characters to sub a story i already know/love?
Israel, the country committing a genocide? The country actively and openly exterminating an entire ethnic group? And the product isn’t even good anyway?
Yea, it’s actually so easy to tell them to fuck off. If you can’t figure that out your moral compass is broken and you should send it in for a warantee repair.
AI gets subs wrong, and thinking that doesn’t matter is both ableist and just a terrible lazy product, but that’s not the pressing matter.
It’s Israel. Because giving money to another party is not a value neutral action. Using a site that pays money to Israel—and you either know what that means or are purposefully avoiding the subject—means you are supporting Israel. Your consumption does not occur in a vacuum.