Amazon is using Twitch livestream content to train its AI models, and Twitch users are not happy about it.
Amazon-owned Twitch announced on Wednesday local time that users can opt out, preventing Amazon from using their content to train AI models. The announcement also officially confirmed something: Amazon has indeed been using Twitch content to train AI models.
During a livestream dedicated to explaining the change, Twitch Head of Community Mary Kish said she expected users to react strongly.
“We do not expect you to be happy or excited about this,” she said. “I also don’t think anyone is going to react positively to this.”
As it turned out, she was right.
The livestream’s real-time chat was quickly flooded with hundreds of anti-AI comments. Several prominent Twitch streamers also spoke out on X, criticizing Amazon for using Twitch content to train AI models and questioning the opt-out mechanism, since the feature places users in an “opted-in” state by default.
“Everyone, remember to turn this feature off and tell Twitch that we don’t want this garbage!” Twitch user Legundo wrote on X.
Twitch Chief Product Officer Mike Minton said he did not know whether Amazon had previously used Twitch livestream content to train AI models.
“I don’t know specifically what Amazon has done in this area, including what content they have used for model training and what they have not used,” Minton said. “I’m not responsible for Amazon’s training efforts.”
Kish and Minton described the opt-out setting as a privacy protection feature unique to Twitch. Minton said: “Almost all publicly available content is used in some form for model training, regardless of whether that use is authorized.”
Users can go to Twitch’s privacy settings and adjust the slider at the bottom of the page to opt out of AI model training. Minton said during the livestream that Twitch uses AI to generate captions, edit videos, and classify content, but currently does not use generative AI features.
Amazon acquired Twitch in 2014.