Today Twitch announced that Amazon plans to scrape the popular livestreaming platform for AI training data. During a follow-up stream, Twitch staff attempted to answer questions and assuage users’ concerns about the overwhelmingly unpopular decision. It did not go well.
Over the course of around an hour, Twitch chief product officer Mike Minton and head of community Mary Kish fielded an avalanche of questions, principal among them: Why not make this feature opt-in by default—thereby giving those who don’t hyper-vigilantly have their finger on Twitch’s purple pulse an actual choice—instead of opt-out?
“Now why is it not opt-in?” said Minton. “That’s what everybody here is spamming in chat. I get it. ‘Let me opt in versus making me opt out.’ There’s an honest answer, and I think most of you can probably appreciate this: If it was opt-in, nobody would opt in. That’s honestly the answer.”
This was followed by a torrent of all-caps chat responses that included “THEN DON’T ROLL IT OUT,” “SO WHY EVEN DO IT,” and “IF NO ONE WOULD OPT IN THAT MEANS NO ONE WANTS IT.”
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The remainder of the stream saw users barrage the duo with questions equal parts fast and furious, to which they replied in empathetic tones while completely failing to justify the new feature. At the crux of Minton and Kish’s argument was the idea that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are already scraping the entire internet for data anyway, so Twitch and Amazon—the smol-est of beans—can’t help but follow along.
“If models were trained on your VOD, it may or may not even have been Amazon,” said Minton. “It was likely any one of the…dozens of companies that are creating models that are using any publicly available content they can find.”
“It’s a delicate topic, and I think our community has the reaction that I expected you guys to have, which is that you don’t like this,” said Kish in response to a question about streamers potentially losing money because viewers might leave Twitch over AI. “Because this is industry standard, going other places won’t absolve you of this…It’s not as easy as saying everyone’s just gonna leave, because this is something that’s really across the board. It’s something that’s happening on livestreaming communities across the space.”
But of course, when it comes to livestreaming, Twitch likes to position itself as an industry leader, so these words rang hollow to many in chat.
“If GenAI is ‘industry standard,’ why are you not helping us fight against it?” asked one chatter. “Why are you rolling over and hiding behind excuses?”
Minton and Kish also took great pains to distinguish between Amazon’s AI training and AI currently in use on Twitch, which already powers captions, safety, and newer features streamers can opt out of like stream summaries and auto clips. Twitch features, said Minton, are powered by pre-existing models, not whatever Amazon has cooking. As for how Amazon plans to use Twitch streamers’ livestreams, VODs, and chat, it’s bewilderingly unclear.
“I’m not responsible for Amazon’s training efforts in terms of use of this content, generative AI training,” said Minton. “I would assume anything that’s part of your channel content [is fair game for training].”
“We do know that it’s being used to train models, but it’s a broad stance of what you can train a model for,” Kish later clarified. “Giving you a list of 500 use cases I don’t think is actually helpful.”
Twitch also does not plan to add any sort of labeling system that will help users tell at a glance who’s opted in and who hasn’t. Additionally, even if you opt out, your chat data can still be used if you spend time in the chat of someone who’s opted in.
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Has Amazon already been using Twitch data to train its models? Also unclear.
“Twitch has not been training models,” said Minton. “I can’t speak to what Amazon is training or not training as it relates to any specific usage of content.”
But again, other people are almost certainly doing it, so Amazon—only one of the biggest companies in human history—really doesn’t have any choice here.
“There’s 10-25 companies around the world that are creating some of these, what we’ll call, ‘frontier’ large language models,” said Minton. “I don’t know this conclusively, but I think it’s a pretty reasonable assumption that almost any available content is being used for model training in one form or another, whether permitted or not. So I think we also just need to acknowledge that there’s a lot here that is even beyond our direct control.”
Minton did clarify, however, that Amazon and Twitch don’t sell data to other third parties, which is, I suppose, the infinitesimally smallest speck of something.
“We do not resell the data to other companies that are training models,” he said. “That’s not what’s going on here. We’re not profiting or making any money by selling your data.”
Viewers in chat also repeatedly brought up a pre-existing UserVoice feedback form requesting that Twitch make AI features opt-out by default. Minton and Kish acknowledged it but once again acted as though Twitch’s hands were tied.
“‘Wasn’t this clear in the UserVoice?’” said Kish. “There’s no misunderstanding.”
“We’re not tone deaf in terms of knowing where the community stands,” said Minton. “We hear you loud and clear.”
In response to that and similar questions, the two again encouraged users to opt out, with Kish even noting that she’d done so with her own channel because she’s aware that members of her community would disapprove otherwise. Minton, on the other hand, said that if, hypothetically, he were a streamer, he’d probably keep the feature on.
“I saw a recent survey that said more than half of adults now use some form of AI on a daily basis,” he said. “Its usage is as high as it’s ever been. Now you wouldn’t know that from reading Twitch chat, of course. That is a general population-type study. It’s also true that the anxiety and anger about AI is as high as ever. Those two things are in conflict. Our bet is that in the long run, the concerns of creators and all the participants in the ecosystem will be addressed, and that in the same way past technology transformations had concerns that were addressed over time, by focusing on improving the experience for creators and viewers on Twitch … it helps viewers understand what’s going on.”
He added, however, that “I understand that I live in a bubble that is not your reality as it relates to this technology and the use of it.”
None of this left viewers feeling particularly satisfied or hopeful—something else Minton was only able to meet with vague platitudes.
“I saw some folks comment in chat,” he said. “It’s always hard to do these streams where the community is super angry. It’s not that we’re unprepared. Just know that what we’re trying to do is triangulate answers to questions that are complex questions that have in some cases concerns from a ‘What we say can get us in trouble’ perspective—not just with the community, but literally in trouble in different ways around the world. Obviously I am not speaking on behalf of Amazon in terms of any of their efforts. So there’s this triangulation going on in terms of trying to find an answer that is as hopefully as helpful as possible to explain what’s happening here and why without breaking into jail.”
It’s going as well as you may have expected
AftermathNicole Carpenter
