Incident 934: NHK Terminates AI Translation Service After Geopolitical Naming Error

Description: 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.

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Alleged: Google developed an AI system deployed by NHK, which harmed NHK , Government of Japan , NHK viewers , Public trust in the media and Japan-China relations.
Alleged implicated AI systems: Google Translate API , NHK AI subtitle translator and NHK live streaming service

Incident Stats

Incident ID
934
Report Count
3
Incident Date
2025-02-10
Editors
Daniel Atherton
NHK to end multilingual subtitle service; English subtitles for live broadcast misspelled "Senkaku Islands" as "Diaoyu Islands"
news.yahoo.co.jp · 2025
AI Translated

On the 12th, NHK announced that it had found cases where the "Senkaku Islands" were displayed as the Chinese spelling "Diaoyu Islands" in its service, which provides live streaming of 24-hour English TV broadcasts on its website and app, an…

NHK ends AI-based multilingual subtitle service due to Senkaku Islands being shown in Chinese name
jiji.com · 2025
AI Translated

NHK announced on the 12th that it would end its multilingual subtitle service for live streaming of English international TV broadcasts on its official website and elsewhere on the 10th. The service had been using Google's artificial intell…

Senkaku Islands Referred to as Diaoyu Islands in Subtitles of NHK Report; Japanese Broadcaster Says AI System Responsible
japannews.yomiuri.co.jp · 2025

An English language news report referencing the Senkaku Islands were referred to as the Diaoyu Islands in Chinese subtitles, NHK announced on Wednesday.

The report, which was related to the Japan-U.S. summit talks, used the Chinese name for…

Variants

A "variant" is an AI incident similar to a known case—it has the same causes, harms, and AI system. Instead of listing it separately, we group it under the first reported incident. Unlike other incidents, variants do not need to have been reported outside the AIID. Learn more from the research paper.
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