If you watched the English-dubbed version of one of several popular anime on Amazon Prime Video lately, like “Banana Fish,” and “No Game, No Life,” you may have noticed something strange. The voices were generic, unexpressive, and at times robotic, completely disconnected from the action unfolding on screen. Some lines even sounded a little glitchy. In a word: it was a disaster.
The embarrassing English voices it turned out, were AI-generated. An entourage of actors didn’t sit down in a room somewhere recording take after take to bring these characters to life; instead the voice lines were automatically stitched together using what’s essentially glorified text-to-speech software, with predictably horrendous results.
Fans were furious. And the fallout on social media quickly became so vociferous that Amazon has now quietly pulled the AI dubs from several of the shows, including “Banana Fish.” The AI-generated Spanish dub for “Banana Fish” and “Vinland Saga,” however, are still available, Anime Corner noted.
Amazon’s AI English Dub for Banana Fish is hilariously bad at times.#BANANAFISH pic.twitter.com/CtiE47W4yh
— Otaku Spirit (@OtakuSpirited) November 29, 2025
But the damage was done. Voice actors, who have been at the forefront of criticizing AI’s encroachment into entertainment industries, torched Amazon for the move.
“Amazon’s choice to use AI to dub Banana Fish is a massive insult to us as performers. AI continues to threaten livelihoods of performers in EVERY language (yes even Japanese performers who are also incredibly vocal on this topic),” Daman Mills, a voice actor known for his work in anime, wrote in a widely shared tweet.
The rollout appears to have taken place over the holiday weekend, without any official announcement from Amazon. In March, the company teased that it would start testing a new “AI-aided” dubbing feature across a small selection of movies in English and Latin American Spanish, but made no mention of anime at the time.
The e-commerce giant has been obsessed with stuffing AI features into its streaming service. Last year, it began showing users AI-generated recaps for TV shows and released another AI tool to recommend you movies based on how similar their plots and character arcs were to your favorite films. It’s also turned a blind eye to clearly AI-generated movie descriptions and posters polluting the platform.
The debacle also comes not long after the popular anime streaming service Crunchryoll was embroiled in an AI controversy of its own, when fans noticed that some subtitles were blatantly AI-generated. The giveaway, in at least one case, was a line that began with “ChatGPT said.”
For fans of “Banana Fish” in particular, the insult rendered by this latest AI job was grievous. They had been waiting years for an English dub of the show, which originally ran in 2018. The show itself was a long-awaited adaptation of a classic manga that wrapped up in 1994. In a sense, an English dub was a moment decades in the making — all to be spoiled by shoddy AI.
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