NHK Terminates AI Translation Service After Geopolitical Naming Error
NHK announced the termination of its AI-powered multilingual subtitle service after an automatic translation error rendered "Senkaku Islands" as "Diaoyu Islands," the Chinese designation. The mistake, discovered on February 10th, 2025 during a news segment, led NHK to deem the service inappropriate. The AI-based subtitles, powered by Google Translate, had been in use since 2020.
- Date it happened
- 2025-02-10
- Organisation involved
- NHK
- Product, system or model
- Google Translate API, NHK AI subtitle translator, NHK live streaming service
This incident was imported from AI Incident Database and is used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Our additions to it — the structured fields, the translation, the checks against other reports — are published under the same licence.
This is a record of what was reported, not a finding that anyone broke the law. If it names your organisation and you believe it is wrong, the corrections process is free and open to everyone.