Amazon is training its AI models on Twitch livestreams, and its users are not happy about it. Twitch, which Amazon owns, announced on Wednesday that users could opt out to prevent Amazon’s AI models from training on their content.
That announcement also served as official confirmation that the training was happening at all. On a livestream explaining the changes, Mary Kish, Twitch’s head of community, said she expected a user backlash.
“We don’t expect you to be happy or excited about this,” she said. “I don’t expect anyone to react to this favorably.”
The live chat function on the livestream was awash with hundreds of anti-AI messages.
Several high-profile Twitch streamers also took to X to criticize both Amazon’s training of its AI models on Twitch content and the opt-out feature, which means users will be automatically opted in. Legundo, a Twitch user, wrote on X: “EVERYONE make sure to turn this off and tell Twitch we don’t want this crap!”
Twitch chief product officer Mike Minton said he didn’t know whether Amazon had already been using Twitch livestreams to train models. “I don’t know what Amazon in this case has done in terms of model training, and what they’ve used and not used,” Minton said.
Kish and Minton framed the opt-out setting as a privacy feature unique to Twitch. “Almost any publicly available content is being used for model training in one form or another, whether permitted or not,” Minton said. They explained that users can opt out of the AI training by going to their privacy settings on Twitch and adjusting the slider at the bottom of the page.
Amazon, which purchased Twitch in 2014, has been rapidly scaling its AI infrastructure in recent months as it winds down its internal models to start competing in the frontier model race with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Twitch uses AI to create captions, clips, and content classifications, but does not employ generative features, according to Minton. This development compares to similar situations in the past, where companies have used user-generated content to train AI models without explicit consent – a practice that has raised concerns about data privacy and ownership, such as the writing detection debate.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday, leaving many questions about the extent of its AI training efforts and how it plans to address user concerns. As the situation continues to unfold, Twitch users are advised to review their privacy settings and make informed decisions about how their content is used.
It is a setting.
Leave a Reply