In Further Assault on Cinema, Amazon Is Deploying AI-Aided Dubs on Streaming Movies
From the streaming service that brought you crappy AI-generated movie posters and totally nonsensical AI-generated synopses, Amazon Prime Video presents: "AI-aided" dubbing! Which will replace actors' original dialog with a translated, machine-amalgamated mess. That's movie magic, people.
Announced this week, the e-commerce giant said it'll be debuting the feature in English and Latin American Spanish for a selection of twelve licensed movies and shows, including the 2003 animated feature "El Cid: La Leyenda."
The pilot program will make its "vast streaming library accessible to even more customers," the company claimed, "offering AI-aided dubbing on licensed movies and series that would not have been dubbed otherwise." (This, we'd wager, is not what Korean director Bong Joon-ho had in mind when he famously urged audiences to overcome the "one-inch tall barrier of subtitles" four years ago.)
Amazon has been pretty ardent on AI, and its huge streaming platform has become a petri dish for all kinds of grotesque machine-generated experimentation. Last fall, for example, it began offering AI-generated recaps for TV shows. Also included in that suite of features? A generative AI tool to recommend you movies with similar plot points and character arcs to your favorite films, just to give you an idea of how much it wants to soullessly codify all spontaneity in art.
Beyond that, Amazon's done little — if anything — to police the AI content that ends up on the platform. Users complain that it's now littered with lazy, almost certainly AI-generated movie descriptions — brandished even on renowned classics like the 1975 Al Pacino film "Dog Day Afternoon." Movie posters on the platform have also succumbed to the trend, with an AI-generated one slapped onto the 1922 horror flick "Nosferatu," enraging cinephiles.
It's not surprising to see Amazon do this, in other words. And yet, to outright swap out the original human performances with an algorithm-altered ones is another level of audaciousness. There's been no shortage of filmmakers and studios experimenting with AI to create new content — or to revive old icons — but this is a retroactive maneuver signaling that the vast corpus of cinema history, from canonical classics to streaming staples, are now fair game to be rewritten with an AI model.
Still, maybe we're getting a little ahead of ourselves, because Amazon is being pretty vague about exactly how its "AI-aided" dubbing works. Mostly, it's emphasized that humans remain in the loop — somewhere along the line, anyhow.
"This AI-aided pilot program is a hybrid approach to dubbing in which localization professionals collaborate with AI to ensure quality control," the company said in the announcement. "AI-aided processes like this one, which incorporate the right amount of human expertise, can enable localization for titles that would not otherwise be accessible to customers."
In any case, these hijinks are not exclusive to Amazon. Recently, fellow streaming titan Netflix came under fire for hosting an AI-upscaled version of an 80s sitcom, plagued with garbled imagery and hallucinated artifacts. Art history isn't just being bastardized, but people's lives, too: in one of its exclusive true crime series, Netflix used AI to reproduce the voice of a murdered woman — a clear sign as any that nothing is considered sacrosanct by tech companies.
More on movies: Disney Says Its "Fantastic Four" Posters Aren't AI, They Actually Just Look Like Absolute Garbage
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