Streaming platform Twitch will now use creator content to train parent company Amazon’s generative AI models. This move sparked a swift and intense backlash from the Twitch community, especially since creators are opting in to have their content used for this AI training by default.
For Amazon, these stream recordings are extremely valuable, providing thousands of hours of audio and video content that is useful for training AI models. But Twitch users are concerned that creators are unknowingly abandoning their content to train Amazon’s AI content model, as they must manually opt out. This is especially concerning on platforms like Twitch, where creators often record live streams of themselves and their voices for hours a week.
In a stream on the official Twitch channel, Twitch Community Director Mary Kish and Chief Product Officer Mike Minton spoke to a live audience of nearly 3,000 offended users, many of whom posted anti-AI sentiments in the chat.
“Why not opt-in? That’s why everyone’s spamming chat. I get it: ‘Instead of getting people to opt in, we’re letting them opt out,'” Minton said. “Well, here’s the honest answer…If this was opt-in, no one would opt in. That’s the honest answer.”
Twitch knows that the streamer community is largely against the use of generative AI. This is because the most popular generative AI products are trained on books, images, videos, and other materials collected from the internet without consent.
Twitch’s approach to breaking the news also suggests the company is bracing for a backlash. Instead of telling the community that Amazon will start training Twitch users’ content, Twitch framed the change as “a setting (addition) that allows you to opt out of having your channel content used to train generative AI content models across Amazon.”
In some cases, this has led to confusion among streamers who wonder if their content was already being fed to Amazon without their knowledge. When one user asked if their videos were already being used for training, Minton replied, “We don’t really know the answer to that question, because we don’t know what Amazon[…]has done in terms of training models and what they’ve used and what they haven’t used.”
Kish pointed out that Twitch is not unique in using user content for AI training. For example, Meta uses public content from its platform to train its own AI models. This means that if your Facebook or Instagram account is public, that data is likely already being used to train Meta’s AI. (If you live in the UK, you can opt out of Meta training. Otherwise, the only way to “opt out” is to use the private settings, which is not practical for creators who monetize their accounts.)
Kish said that including an opt-out option on Twitch is in itself a response to what this community has been saying about not wanting to train Gen AI models, and we want to provide that option.
To opt out of AI training on Twitch, users can go to their channel settings (not the creator dashboard), select the Security & Privacy tab, scroll down to the “Train Generative AI” option, and toggle it off.
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