(This is the same tactic that the Right uses to get people or businesses 'cancelled'. It's extremely effective. It's time we use it to our advantage to keep the quality of our entertainment, and its localization, at the highest possible quality.)

Keyboard warriors, it's your time to shine.

Your voice -- your responses, your messaging that you will not pay for this garbage -- becomes the weapons workers in the industry need.

I guarantee you, every Reddit post, every huge Twitter thread, every article on a news site will be shared with management as an I TOLD YOU SO.

We need journalists to help, too. Write articles about how terrible it is, and how bad it makes it look the company. Name and shame the people in the credits responsible for the travesty. Contact the company for comment.

Be the loudest, most annoying voice possible.

Here's the good news: though the workers 'making' these AI locs can't do much to stop them, WE, THE CONSUMERS, CAN.

Email them. Cancel your subscription. Call them and complain.
Be a Karen. Tell them they have lost your dollar.

Workers secretly want this. They want consumers to riot.

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.

"Well, you can also use it to write client emails!"

Emails are not the hard, time-consuming part of our job. Any person in the industry who's been here a while knows how to write an email.

So literally none of us in the department were using AI.

We were encouraged to start using AI in our day-to-day work. Our direct department head did a 'tutorial' with us to show us how to use it... to automatically schedule weekly meetings for a project.

Except we already could do that by hand, like, super easily.

At least two years ago, we got word from upper management that they want us to "start using more AI".

Why? Because "they want to save time and money".

For clarity, when I say "we" in the following bit, I mean "the people who actually do the localization work: translators, adaptors, actors, directors, project managers, department heads".

When I say "upper management", i mean "upper-level directors, CFOs, CTOs, CEOs".

I think about the number of low-wage workers I know who have been fired for stupid, petty, trumped-up, or outright false reasons, and how that kind of job loss *really can* change your life forever...and I'm just raging all over again.