Amazon Can Use Your Twitch Content to Train Its AI—Unless You Opt Out

Content to Train Its AI—Unless You Opt Out">

Twitch has updated its account settings to let streamers opt out of having their content used to help train the artificial intelligence models of Twitch’s parent company, Amazon.

Although the move has reassured some creators, it remains unclear exactly when the streaming platform began using the posts, streams, and videos of its users to train Amazon’s systems. The revelation is raising new concerns about how big tech companies handle their users’ data .

The opt-out process is simple. From the Twitch website or mobile app, click on your account avatar, select Settings, and then go to the Security and Privacy section in the menu. There, you’ll find the Generative AI Training option, where you can disable the use of your content for that purpose.

In the language next to the toggle, Twitch notes that “disabling this option does not prevent Twitch and Amazon from using your channel’s content for other purposes described in Twitch’s Privacy Notice.” These include AI-powered platform features designed to facilitate streamers’ growth and monetization, such as real-time assistance for sponsorship campaigns, viewer discovery through recommendations, and community safety via tools like AutoMod.

The new setting aims to recognize creators’ right to decide how the content they produce is used. However, its launch has also raised questions about how Twitch and Amazon have used that content up to now.

In a forum dedicated to the topic, more than 16,000 creators expressed opposition to having their content being used by default to train Amazon’s AI systems—a practice that only came to light following the update to the settings.

The backlash arose after a livestream in which Mary Kish, Twitch’s head of community, explained the introduction of the changes. The executive acknowledged that the change would provoke a negative reaction. Mike Minton, Twitch’s head of product, also noted—in what he described as “a candid response”—that keeping the option to use content for AI training enabled by default was necessary, since otherwise “no one would participate” in the process.

Minton pointed out that these mechanisms are not unique to Twitch and considered it likely that other companies developing AI systems are also extracting content from Twitch and other services to use in training their models. “I don’t know for sure,” he said, “but I think it’s quite reasonable to assume that almost any publicly available content is used to train models in one way or another, with or without permission. So I think we also need to acknowledge that there’s a lot here that’s beyond even our direct control.”