Amazon Can Use Your Twitch Content to Train Its AI—Unless You Opt Out
When Twitch announced that streamers could opt out, thousands of users questioned why their content was being used to train AI models in the first place.
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.
