Twitch Users Are Furious After Amazon's AI Training Confirmed

Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch announced Wednesday a new setting that lets users opt out of having Amazon train its AI models on their content. The announcement itself was the first official confirmation that Amazon has, in fact, been using Twitch streams to train AI. Mary Kish, Twitch's head of community, addressed the change on a livestream and openly admitted she expected backlash: "We're not expecting you to be happy or excited about this. I don't think anyone's going to react positively," she said.

Her prediction held up. The livestream's chat filled with hundreds of anti-AI messages, and a number of prominent Twitch streamers took to X to criticize both Amazon's AI training and the opt-out system, which by default counts every user as having consented. "Everybody make sure you turn this off and tell Twitch we don't need this!" wrote Twitch user Legundo on X.

Mike Minton, Twitch's chief product officer, admitted he doesn't even know how long Amazon has been using Twitch streams to train its models: "I don't know what Amazon has done in terms of model training, what it has and hasn't used. I'm not responsible for Amazon's training work," he said. At the same time, Minton acknowledged that "nearly all publicly available content, permissioned or not, is being used in some form to train models."

Users can opt out of AI training by toggling a switch in Twitch's privacy settings. Minton also said Twitch uses AI for captions, clip generation, and content classification, but does not apply generative features. Amazon declined to comment when contacted by Business Insider.

The episode unfolds against the backdrop of Amazon aggressively expanding its own AI infrastructure in recent months, winding down internal models, and gearing up to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic in the race for frontier AI models — underscoring how content platform users' fears of losing control over their own content are becoming a growing problem across the industry.