There’s something oddly mesmerizing about watching auto-generated captions drift across a video screen out of sync. They start moments behind or ahead, turning straightforward dialogue into a cryptic puzzle. A simple sentence from a speaker can fragment into unrelated words popping up at random, like a broken teleprompter.

This isn't just a minor annoyance. It reshapes the viewer’s experience, sometimes adding unintended humor or confusion. The captions are supposed to help, but instead, they create a parallel narrative that rarely aligns with what’s being said.

What fascinates me is how these glitches persist across platforms and languages, despite advances in speech recognition. It’s as if the technology insists on reminding us of its limits by throwing these awkward caption delays into the mix.

Maybe one day captions will be perfect. Until then, they remain a glitchy subtext that forces viewers to guess as much as listen.