Amazon Removes English Dub Featuring AI Voices For Popular Anime Banana Fish After Audience Backlash

Amazon appears to have removed an English dub track that featured AI voices from the anime series Banana Fish after fans spotted that there was an “AI beta” of an English dub included in the ‘Audio Languages’ option on the streamer.

A video that highlighted the AI voices used in the dub made its way through social media and led to some serious criticism from subscribers, fans, influencers, and more. “Amazon has started using AI to add English Dubs to anime like BANANA FISH,” one streamer wrote on Twitter/X alongside a clip with the dub included. “It’s really quite terrible and shows how important real actors are.”

https://twitter.com/OtakuSpirited/status/1994598770202611749?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

It appears as though Amazon saw the blowback and pulled the option from the Prime offering — and because of the removal, there is now no English language dub option at all.

This isn’t the first time anime has been the target of AI controversies lately. The upcoming series Sekiro: No Defeat recently came under fire for alleged usage of AI art, but Crunchyroll went on to go on the record and state that the show, which will arrive in 2026 will be “a fully hand-drawn 2D animation” project.

The company and streamer also went as far as to recently confirm that they won’t use AI in their creative process, which includes hiring real voice actors.

“We consider them to be creators because they are contributing to the story and plot with their voice,” Crunchyroll CEO Shams Purini told Forbes in an interview back in April. Let’s hope other streamers start to see it the way Crunchyroll does.

Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.