Livestreaming giants Twitch have admitted using streamed content to train the generative AI models of parent company Amazon. While it’s not clear when the platform began feeding its users’ work into Jeffy B’s Planetkilling Machines, yesterday’s announcement of an opt-out toggle – buried deep within Twitch’s security settings, and set to enable AI stream-gobbling by default – sparked outrage among streamers and viewers that such scraping was occurring at all.

Twitch’s chief product officer Mike Minton and head of community Mary Kish were wheeled out to explain the policy in a stream of their own, though it’s possible the only ones reassured by the discussion were the Amazon bots themselves. Although Minton was upfront about the models’ use of streamed video, he conceded that he didn’t know if users’ personal data had also been caught up in the scraping net, and that he wasn’t actually sure what Amazon "has done in terms of model training." Awesome. Awesome.

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Twitch now lets users opt out of Amazon's use of content from their channels to train Amazon's "generative AI content models." The change, announced today, comes more than two years after a company executive confirmed that Amazon was using Twitch content for AI training.

In an updated support page, Twitch confirms that users must opt out if they don’t want their “streams, VODs, clips, stream chats, and pictures and text on your channel [to] be used in future training of a model developed by Amazon whose purpose is to generate or synthesize text, audio, images, or video.”

To opt out, users must go to the proper settings at www.twitch.tv/settings/security.

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