Twitch Sparks Fury as Amazon Sneakily Trains AI on Streamers' Content

Twitch, a popular website where people stream themselves playing games and chatting with viewers, is facing criticism from its users after it was revealed that Amazon, which owns Twitch, is using content from the platform to train its artificial intelligence AI systems. The feature that allows Amazon to collect and use data from Twitch streams, chats, and other content is turned on by default, meaning users are automatically included unless they choose to opt out. This has caused frustration among many Twitch creators, who feel their content is being used without their clear permission.

Mike Minton, Twitch's chief product officer, explained that users can turn off the feature if they do not want their content used for AI training. However, he admitted that if the feature was opt-in instead of opt-out, almost no one would agree to it. The AI training is meant to help Amazon improve things like automatic subtitles for videos, which can make streams more accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. The company says it will not sell the data to other companies, but some users are still worried about how their creative work is being used.

To opt out, users need to go to their Streamer Dashboard, click on Settings, then Security and Privacy, and turn off the option for 'training for Generative AI. ' However, some users have reported that even after turning off the feature, it sometimes turns itself back on. Mary Kish, Twitch's head of community, said that collecting data for AI training is now common in the tech industry, but she understands why people are upset. Many users commented during a livestream that they do not want their creativity and content to be used to train AI. Some believe Twitch should set a better example by not collecting data without clear permission. It is not clear when Amazon started using Twitch data for AI, and even Twitch staff are unsure about what has already been used. Amazon bought Twitch in 2014 and is investing heavily in AI to compete with other tech giants like Google and Meta.