Twitch will use streamers’ content to train Amazon’s AI models by default

Twitch has started allowing its parent company Amazon to use creators’ content to train generative AI models, with streamers automatically opted in unless they manually disable the setting.

The move has drawn backlash from the Twitch community, TechCrunch reports, largely because creators were enrolled by default rather than asked for permission first. For Amazon, Twitch offers a particularly valuable source of training data, with streamers producing thousands of hours of video and audio and often broadcasting their faces and voices for hours at a time.

Many creators have objected to the opt-out approach because their content can be used for AI training unless they discover the setting and turn it off themselves. Asked during a livestream on Twitch’s official channel why the company had not made the feature opt-in instead, Chief Product Officer Mike Minton acknowledged that far fewer creators would have agreed to participate if they had been asked in advance. Nearly 3,000 viewers were watching the discussion, many of them unhappy with the change.

Twitch also introduced the policy indirectly, describing it as “a setting that lets you opt out of having your channel content used to train generative AI content models across Amazon” rather than announcing that Amazon would begin using creator content for AI training. The wording left some streamers wondering whether their videos had already been used before the new setting appeared. When Minton was asked about this directly, he said he did not know what Amazon had previously used to train its models.

Twitch notes that other major platforms also use publicly available user content for AI training. Meta, for example, trains its models on public content from Facebook and Instagram, meaning material posted to public accounts may already be included. Twitch says it introduced the opt-out setting in response to a creator community that is largely skeptical of generative AI, giving streamers a way to decide whether their content can be used.

Creators who do not want their streams used for AI training can disable the option in their channel settings under Security and Privacy, where Twitch has added a Generative AI Training toggle.