Crunchyroll, the massively popular anime streaming service and distributor, just got caught using obvious AI slop in its subtitles.

The slipup was made in the premiere episode of a new series called “Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show” — and trust us, there’s no guesswork involved in sniffing out the AI here.

Around the 19:12 mark, the show’s German subtitles feature a big fat “ChatGPT said:” jammed into the dialog. A classic, lazy error. (We double checked, and it’s still there as of this morning.)

The fans who spotted this shoddy work didn’t hold back in expressing their disappointment.

“This is not acceptable,” wrote a user on Bluesky who was among the first to flag the AI usage. “How can we be expected to pay for a service that clearly doesn’t care about the quality of its products?”

This might not come as a surprise to astute anime fans who’ve long complained about the quality of some of the service’s subtitles. In late 2023, Crunchyroll infamously was forced to take down the first episode of the series “The Yuzuki Family’s Four Sons” after the subs turned out to be outrageously bad. Errors ranging from random punctuation to straight up getting a character’s name wrong raised the specter of machine translation.

Recently, some fans have found that the errors typically arise from the English closed captions — designed to be watched with the English dub — which show telltale signs of automation in how the text would incorrectly transcribe names or refer to characters that don’t exist.

Pinning the blame for this latest incident is a bit tricky, though, since translations come from a variety of sources — sometimes from the production company, or the show’s license holder, or from Crunchyroll’s team.

Regardless, it won’t help Crunchyroll’s case that it’s openly flirted with — and flip-flopped on — AI for some time now.

In an interview with The Verge last year, CEO Rahul Purini said that using AI to put out subtitles faster was “definitely an area where we are focused on.”

“AI is definitely something that we think about at a lot of different workflows within the organization,” Purini said in the interview. “Right now, one of the areas we are very focused on testing is our subtitling and closed captioning, where we go from speech to text and 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.”

Purini has since changed his tune. In an interview with Forbes in April, he insisted that the company is”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,” Purini added.

Fans were quick to declare victory at the time. Maybe it was premature.

More on AI: In Further Assault on Cinema, Amazon Is Deploying AI-Aided Dubs on Streaming Movies