On the same livestream, Mary Kish, head of community at Twitch, took viewers through a tutorial on how to disable generative AI training through a user’s channel settings.
Those that do want to disable it would need to navigate to the Settings tab in their Streamer Dashboard, click the Security and Privacy tab, then scroll down to near the bottom of the options and toggle off “training for Generative AI”.
Doing so will prevent Amazon from using streams, clips, images, chats and other channel content to train its generative AI models.
Some users have since said despite toggling off the option, they have then returned to the settings to find the feature turned on again.
“Went in and toggled the switch off, exited, went back in, switch is still on,” one said, external.
Data collection for AI training has become an industry standard, Kish said.
“We don’t expect you to be happy or excited about this. I don’t expect anyone to react to this favourably,” she added.
The stream’s chat column was flooded with hundreds of comments from users criticising the move.
One viewer wrote: “Nobody would opt in because nobody wants to feed AI with our creativity and content.”
Another said Twitch had an “opportunity to set an industry standard” to push back against data collection for AI.
It is not clear when Amazon began collecting Twitch users’ data to train its AI models.
Minton said during the stream that he did not know if users’ data had already been scraped for training, adding that he was unsure what Amazon “has done in terms of model training and what they’ve used and not used.”
Amazon, which bought Twitch for nearly $1bn (£740m) in 2014, runs a host of AI services and has heavily invested in the its development as it seeks to compete with Google, Meta and other technology giants.
