The Twitch streaming platform is owned by Amazon. They use your Twitch streams for training AI. Twitch Support tweeted about it yesterday: [Twitter, archive]

We’ve added a setting that lets you opt out of having your channel content used to train generative AI content models across Amazon.

Mike Minton, Chief Product Officer at Twitch, went on the official Twitch Patch notes stream later that day. Here’s Mike giving the whole game away: [Bluesky, video]

There’s an honest answer, and I think most of you probably can appreciate this. If it was opt-in, nobody would opt in. That’s honestly the answer.

Training includes all your chat comments and the games the streamers are streaming.

Only the streamers can switch this off at all. Go to Settings, Security and Privacy, and turn off “Training for Generative AI.” Reports are that it repeatedly switches itself back on.

Minton admitted in 2024 that Amazon was already training on Twitch streams: [Information, archive]

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think obviously within the bounds of user trust within the bounds of privacy regulations, which vary all around the world, but of course we have a role to play in that.

“A role,” huh.

On the Twitch creator improvements forum, someone suggested in May: “Make all AI features optional, and opt-out by default.” It’s the number one suggestion, with over 15,000 votes. Number two is around 1,700. [Twitch]

All this is obviously just illegal in Europe under the GDPR. So get those data subject requests rolling.

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