Amazon indicated for the first time this week that any video broadcast via its livestreaming platform Twitch could be used to train generative AI, unless users take steps to avoid it, which has caused a significant backlash from both audiences and content creators.

The story began with a post on the official Twitch Support account on X (formerly Twitter) which informed users of the existence of a new option on the Twitch dashboard. That option lets users opt out of Amazon using content on their channel to train generative AI.

That, in turn, served as a couple of additional implicit announcements: Amazon intends to use Twitch as a data farm, and this option is enabled by default for all Twitch accounts. You have to actively turn it off or anything you broadcast via Twitch could be fed into “generative AI content models at Amazon.”

According to Twitch’s FAQ, the data gathered from Twitch may be used to train a future model “whose purpose is to generate or synthesize text, audio, images, or video.”

(To opt out of Amazon’s training on your own Twitch channel, go to the Settings menu, look for the “Training for Generative AI” section under Security and Privacy, and turn it off. Don’t be surprised if this takes more than one try, as several users have taken to social media to report that the training option likes to turn itself back on when you aren’t looking.)

A follow-up stream from Twitch’s head of community, Mary Kish, poured some more gasoline on the flames. Kish aired a live interview on her personal Twitch channel with Mike Minton, chief product officer at Twitch, and Minton chose that moment to get uncommonly candid.

In response to viewers demanding to know why the AI settings on Twitch weren’t opt-in instead of opt-out, Minton said, “There’s an honest answer, and I think most of you can probably appreciate this. If it was opt-in, nobody would opt in.”

Kish and Minton made an additional point of drawing a distinction between AI-powered features that are already on Twitch, such as auto-captions, and the unspecified models that Amazon plans to use Twitch data to train.

“…I think our community has the reaction that I expected you guys to have, which is that you don’t like this,” Kish said. “Because this is industry standard, going other places [besides Twitch] won’t absolve you of this… it’s something that’s happening on livestreaming communities across the space.”

Twitch came out of the 2020 lockdowns in a period of massive growth, and for several years, accounted for roughly 80 to 90% of online livestreaming. Since then, however, its market share has steadily eroded. According to a July report by the Kyiv-based analytics firm StreamsCharts, YouTube Live and TikTok Live have both overtaken Twitch’s audience share, though Twitch does still handle nearly half of livestreamed video game content.

That, in turn, brings up some of its own issues.

“…It gets me really worried about all the elements I use in my streams,” Lance Icarus, a Seattle-based gaming broadcaster, told GeekWire via Discord. “I play indie games that are proud to not be GenAI. Can I stream that game knowing I’m feeding that playthrough into a machine?”

Icarus continued, “What about when I stream with guests? Some of them are voice talents who fought hard to gain rights against the very thing I’m asking them to do by streaming on our channel. I’m still trying to wrap my head around all the ramifications.”

Beyond the simple logistics, it’s hard to overstate the degree of hostility that Amazon and Twitch are facing over this move, from both broadcasters and audience members.

“They had to do it like this,” Seattle-based Twitch streamer Will Overgard told GeekWire. “Generative AI doesn’t make money, but selling data does. I guess they turned data collection on for everyone hoping enough people wouldn’t know to turn it off or forget about it so they’d have something to flog.”

Kish noted during her Aug. 12 stream that Twitch and Amazon are watching the numbers to see how many broadcasters actively opt out of being used as training data.

At time of writing, discussions are ongoing about what if any reaction this will draw from the creator community on Twitch, which still drives much of the platform’s business. One step that’s already been taken is that streamers have begun to tag their own broadcasts with “AIOptedOut” or “NoAI” to indicate their feelings on the matter. It’s now a question of whether audiences will follow suit.

Amazon is training its AI on your Twitch streams by default, and the only way out is a hidden toggle even the company admits nobody would've chosen willingly.