Twitch has announced that it will now allow its parent company, Amazon, to use creators' content for training generative AI models. The decision has sparked immediate and intense criticism from the Twitch community, largely because creators are automatically opted in by default. For Amazon, these streams are a goldmine—thousands of hours of audio and video that can be used to refine AI systems. However, many Twitch users are concerned that, since opting out requires a manual step, they might unknowingly hand over their content for AI training. This worry is especially pronounced on a platform where streamers often broadcast themselves and their voices for hours each week.

During a live stream on Twitch's official channel, Head of Community Mary Kish and Chief Product Officer Mike Minton faced an audience of nearly 3,000 frustrated users, many of whom flooded the chat with anti-AI messages. "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 is well aware that its streamer community is largely against generative AI, especially since many popular AI tools are trained on content scraped from the internet without permission. The way the company chose to announce this change also shows it expected pushback. Rather than directly telling users that Amazon would begin training on their content, Twitch framed the update as "[adding] a setting that lets you opt out of having your channel content used to train generative AI content models across Amazon."

This framing left some streamers confused about whether their videos had already been used for training without their knowledge. When one user asked if their content had already been fed into Amazon's models, Minton admitted, "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 pointed out that Twitch isn't alone in this practice. Meta, for instance, uses public content from its platforms to train its AI models, meaning that if your Facebook or Instagram accounts are public, your data has likely already been used for Meta's training. (If you're in the U.K., you can opt out of Meta's training—otherwise, the only way to avoid it is to make your accounts private, which isn't practical for creators who rely on them for income.)

Kish also emphasized that offering an opt-out at all 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 on Twitch, users can go to their channel settings (not the creator dashboard), click on the security and privacy tab, scroll to the option labeled "training for generative AI," and toggle it off.