By Default, Twitch Hands Streamers' Content to Amazon for AI Training

The streaming platform Twitch has announced that it will begin using creators' content to train the generative AI models of its parent company, Amazon. The key detail that set off a wave of outrage: streamers are enrolled in the program by default, and opting out requires a manual step.

For Amazon, recorded broadcasts are enormously valuable — thousands of hours of audio and video. But that is precisely why Twitch users are worried. On a platform where creators broadcast themselves and their own voices for many hours a week, an opt-out mechanism means that many could hand over their content for AI training without ever noticing.

“Nobody would agree to it”

Stepping up to explain things to the audience were Mary Kish, head of community, and Mike Minton, VP of product. Their stream on Twitch's official channel drew nearly three thousand irritated users, many of whom flooded the chat with anti-AI slogans.

To the central question — why consent wasn't made voluntary (opt-in) — Minton responded with disarming candor: “There's an honest answer here… If it was opt-in, nobody would opt in. That's the honest answer.”

The very way the news was framed betrays that the company was bracing for backlash. Rather than stating plainly that Amazon would begin training on user content, Twitch presented the change as “adding a setting that lets you opt out” of having your channel's content used.

This bred confusion: some streamers weren't sure whether their material had already been fed to Amazon before the announcement. When one viewer asked about it directly, Minton admitted: “I don't know the answer to that question, because I don't know what Amazon has done in terms of training models and what it has used.”

“We're not the only ones”

Kish pointed out that Twitch is not unique: Meta, for instance, trains its models on public content from Facebook and Instagram. If an account is open, the data has most likely already been used; in the UK you can opt out, but in other countries the only option is to make the profile private — which is unrealistic for creators who earn a living from being public. According to Kish, the mere existence of an opt-out button is itself a response to the voice of a community that doesn't want to train generative models.

To turn off AI training, you need to go into the channel settings (not the creator dashboard), select the security and privacy tab, find the “generative AI training” item, and switch it off.

Source: TechCrunch