Amazon will train on Twitch streamers’ content by default, unless they opt out

The streaming platform Twitch will now use creators’ content to help train generative AI models for its parent company, Amazon. This move has inspired swift and concentrated backlash from the Twitch community, especially because creators are opted in to having their content used for this AI training by default.

For Amazon, these stream recordings are incredibly valuable, offering thousands of hours of audio and video content to help train AI models. But Twitch users worry that since creators have to manually opt out, they might be surrendering their content to train Amazon’s AI content models without even knowing it. This is especially concerning on a platform like Twitch, where creators are often recording livestreams of themselves and their voices for many hours per week.

In a stream on the official Twitch channel, Twitch Head of Community Mary Kish and Chief Product Officer Mike Minton addressed a live audience of nearly 3,000 aggrieved users, many of whom were posting anti-AI sentiments in the chat.

“Why is it not opt-in? That’s what everybody is spamming in chat. I get it. ‘Let me opt in versus making me opt out,’” Minton said. “Well, there’s an honest answer… If this was opt-in, nobody would opt in. That’s honestly the answer.”

Twitch knows that its community of streamers is largely opposed to the use of generative AI, since the most prevalent generative AI products are trained on books, images, videos, and other materials scraped from the internet without consent.

Even Twitch’s approach to breaking this news shows that the company is braced for backlash. Instead of telling the community that Amazon would begin training on Twitch users’ content, Twitch framed this change as “[adding] a setting that lets you opt out of having your channel content used to train generative AI content models across Amazon.”

In some cases, this created confusion among streamers about whether their content had already been fed to Amazon without their knowledge. When one user asked if their videos had already been used for training, Minton responded, “I don’t actually know the answer to that question because I don’t know what Amazon […] has done in terms of model training and what they’ve used and not used.”

Kish noted that Twitch is not unique in its use of user content for AI training. Meta, for example, uses public content from its platforms to train its own AI models, meaning that if your Facebook and Instagram accounts are public, then your data has probably already been used for Meta’s AI training. (If you live in the U.K., you can opt out of Meta’s training — if not, the only way to “opt out” is to use private settings, which isn’t feasible for creators who monetize their accounts.)

Kish said that even including an opt-out option on Twitch is “a reflection of reacting to this community’s voice that you are not wanting to train Gen AI models, and we want to give you that option.”

To opt out of AI training on Twitch, users can navigate to their channel settings (not the creator dashboard), select the security and privacy tab, scroll down to the option “training for generative AI,” and toggle it off.

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Reporting from TechCrunch contributed to this story.