Long story short: the people who are 'making' these dubs probably hate it just as much as we do, but they don't have any choice.

If they want to keep their job (and in this economy, and the only way to have health insurance being through your job, they do!) they have to do as they're told.

"Every other company is doing it, and charging cheaper prices for localization. If we don't do this, we will go under."

"Audiences don't care that much about quality. So if we can meet the bare minimum and save money, that's best for everyone."

"Have you run the numbers though? Are you suuuuure?"

I know a few managers who told Upper Management that this was a bad deal. It's not saving time, it's not saving money, and it could hurt our brand if it damages the quality too much.

But they wanted to stay the course, and they gave us a lot of different reasons why:

My manager grimaced and shrugged.

"Yeahhhh, I know it's not ideal, and that doing it the way we always have would be better all around... but the CEO reeeeally wants us to start using more AI. Can we just do it for this project and... see how it goes?"

In private messages, we all agreed: this was bad for the shows, bad for consumers, and bad for our translation teams. No one was benefiting from this, except for the company's bottom line... and honestly, even that was all speculation.

But complaining to our management didn't do much.

Then came the push to start using AI as part of our subtitling flows.

"It'll save time and money, because translators can just post-edit!"

Never mind the fact that we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on purchasing AI licenses, it didn't lead to much improvement in translation speed.