Tech Desk:
Popular livestreaming service Twitch has added an opt-out setting allowing creators and viewers to stop parent company Amazon from scraping their platform content to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) models. Users can now manually adjust their privacy settings to block access to their streams, video clips, channel images, and chat logs.
The move comes after confirmation that Amazon—which acquired Twitch in 2014 for nearly $1 billion—was quietly harvesting platform data for AI development, sparking widespread pushback across the community. Amazon has been aggressively expanding its generative AI infrastructure to maintain parity with tech rivals like Google and Meta.
During a broadcast on the platform, Twitch’s Chief Product Officer, Mike Minton, confirmed that AI training data collection had been enabled by default, aligning with current tech industry trends. However, he noted that Twitch would respect user preferences for those choosing to opt out.
Addressing why the feature was enabled automatically rather than requiring user consent beforehand, Minton was candid: “If it’s opt-in, nobody would opt-in. That’s the honest answer.”
He reassured users that while data from accounts that remain opted-in would be used internally by Amazon, it would not be resold to third-party companies.
During the same broadcast, Mary Kish, Twitch’s Head of Community, walked viewers through the channel dashboard settings to demonstrate how to disable generative AI data collection. Kish acknowledged the negative feedback, stating: “We don’t expect you to be happy or excited about this.”
The stream’s live chat was quickly overwhelmed with criticism from creators and viewers alike. One user commented that creators do not want their “creativity and content to feed AI,” while another noted that Twitch missed a critical opportunity to push back against aggressive industry-wide data collection.
Twitch executives could not specify when Amazon began scraping user data or how much content has already been processed for model training.