Twitch will use creators’ channel content to train generative AI models for Amazon. The change puts streamers in by default. Anyone who wants out has to turn the setting off themselves.
The platform’s parent company sees real value in those stream recordings. They supply thousands of hours of audio and video that can feed AI models. Streamers, though, have pushed back hard. Many record themselves and their voices for long stretches every week. The fear is simple: content could get used for training without the creator even realizing it happened.
Community Pushback and the Official Response
The reaction came fast and concentrated. Users made clear they didn’t want their work feeding generative AI systems. Most of those systems already train on books, images, videos, and other material pulled from the open web without permission. Twitch’s own community sits largely against that practice.
Twitch’s Head of Community Mary Kish and Chief Product Officer Mike Minton faced the criticism directly. They held a stream on the official Twitch channel and spoke to a live audience of nearly 3,000 people. Chat filled with anti-AI messages.
Minton addressed the biggest complaint head-on. People kept asking why the setting wasn’t opt-in. “Why is it not opt-in? That’s what everybody is spamming in chat. I get it. ‘Let me opt in versus making me opt out,’” he said. “Well, there’s an honest answer… If this was opt-in, nobody would opt in. That’s honestly the answer.”
The way Twitch announced the change also drew notice. Instead of stating that Amazon would start training on user content, the company framed the update as adding a setting that lets creators opt out of having their channel content used to train generative AI models across Amazon. That wording left some streamers unsure whether their past videos had already gone into training. When one user asked exactly that, Minton said he didn’t know what Amazon had already done with model training or which material it had used.
Kish pointed out that Twitch is not the only platform taking this route. Meta trains its own AI models on public content from Facebook and Instagram. If those accounts stay public, the data has likely already been used. People in the U.K. can opt out of Meta’s training; elsewhere the only real option is to switch accounts to private, which most creators who earn money from their presence can’t do.
Kish framed Twitch’s decision to offer an opt-out at all as a response to the community. Streamers made clear they did not want their content used for generative AI, and the company decided to give them a way out.
How to Turn Off AI Training on Twitch
The control sits in channel settings, not the creator dashboard. Open the security and privacy tab, scroll to the option labeled “training for generative AI,” and switch it off.