Kateryna Levytska
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13 August, 11:10
The popular streaming platform Twitch will now use streamers’ content to train the artificial intelligence models of its parent company, Amazon. The feature is enabled by default, but fortunately it can still be disabled in the settings, as reports TechCrunch.
Twitch streams are of great value to Amazon: they represent thousands of hours of audio and video that can be used to train AI completely free of charge. This includes not only live streams, but also video recordings, clips, chat messages and other channel content.
At the same time, the decision to make this feature the default setting has sparked outrage among users. Currently, to opt out of AI training, creators must go to their privacy settings and locate a specific toggle.
During a broadcast on the official Twitch channel, Twitch Community Lead Mary Kish and Product Director Mike Minton spoke to nearly 3,000 viewers, giving an honest answer regarding this decision:
“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.Well, there’s an honest answer… If this was opt-in, nobody would opt in. That’s honestly the answer.”
In fact, the very way in which Twitch announced the new feature suggests that the company is expecting a negative reaction. Instead of directly informing the community that Amazon would begin training its models on Twitch users’ content, the platform announced that it was “adding a setting that allows you to opt out of having your channel’s content used to train generative AI models”.
In some cases, this merely confused creators, who began asking whether their content had previously been shared with Amazon. Minton replied:
“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, meanwhile, pointed out that Twitch is not unique in using user-generated content to train AI. Meta also uses public content from Facebook and Instagram to train its own models.
To opt out of AI training on Twitch, users need to go to their channel settings, select the ‘Safety and Privacy’ tab, scroll down to the ‘Generative AI Training’ option and switch it off.
Read also: WSJ: Apple is buying up news access for its AI-powered Siri – publishers are being promised hundreds of millions of dollars
