As generative AI material threatens to encroach further and further upon the entertainment industry, animation—and Japanese animation in particular—has become something of a major battleground, as both sides of production and distribution weigh up the worth (and potential backlash) of using the technology. But over the weekend, a surprisingly grim new frontier opened up in that battle: the arrival of AI-generated anime dubs.
Over the course of the holiday break in the United States, Prime Video rolled out the early stages of a new beta program that utilizes generative AI to voice English and Latin American language dubs of several anime series in the streamer’s catalogue, including the likes of Mappa’s 2018 adaptation of Banana Fish (which has, somewhat controversially, never received an English-language dub before this) and the 2017 Madhouse No Game No Life movie No Game No Life Zero. Not officially announced by Amazon, it took aggrieved anime fans kicking up a storm on social media to bring the rollout to people’s attention.
And for good reason, because the dubs sound (perhaps to the surprise of no one outside of the AI accelerationist sphere) absolutely awful:
Amazon’s AI English Dub for Banana Fish is hilariously bad at times.#BANANAFISH pic.twitter.com/CtiE47W4yh
— Otaku Spirit (@OtakuSpirited) November 29, 2025
Amazon’s AI Dub of No Game No Life is Horrific!! The random Japanese voicing popping in and out is hilarious!@SentaiFilmworks, please give them your Official English Dub!#NoGameNoLife #ノゲノラ pic.twitter.com/apFZH51zhS
— Otaku Spirit (@OtakuSpirited) November 29, 2025
io9 has reached out to Prime Video for comment on the rollout of its AI dub beta and will update if we hear back from the streamer.
Even before you get to the translated script itself, these dubs are well below any kind of level of acceptable. The intonation, the pacing, the emotion (or rather, distinct lack thereof): there’s always been a brand of anime diehard who has long had a perception of dubbed anime as lesser than the original Japanese work for myriad reasons and that dubbing has a legacy of poor quality, in spite of leaps and bounds of improvements in dubbing quality made over the years as anime has only become more and more mainstream. And yet these AI dubs are somehow even worse than the absolute lowest of those perceptions made manifest.
Beta labelling or otherwise, it’s almost shocking that Amazon would consider these acceptable to go live, regardless of how much or how little fanfare they made about the initiative. It’s further shocking that, in some cases, the AI dubbing is being used on projects that have either famously been waiting years for dubs, like Banana Fish, or, in some wild instances, already received dubs that utilize actual human beings—as is the case with No Game No Life Zero, which was dubbed by Sentai Filmworks. In those cases, the AI dub isn’t filling a void but effectively erasing the past for the sake of trying to shoehorn a misguided vision of the future into reality.
With any hope, Amazon will see the PR nightmare created by this “beta” and pull back from attempting more—a push and pull every studio is having to consider now as they try to march forward with public-facing generative AI content. But between Crunchyroll’s desire to experiment more and more with AI-translated subtitles and initiatives like this, it’s clear that some of the most oft-persecuted professionals when it comes to exporting anime are facing being cast aside, quality be damned—and regardless of how you feel about dub and translation quality in the here and now, non-Japanese anime audiences are only going to suffer if platforms keep trying to force this upon them in a race to the bottom.
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