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 voc

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