Amazon Will Train On Twitch Streamers' Content By Default, Unless They Opt Out 43
Twitch will begin allowing Amazon to use streamers' content to train generative AI models by default, requiring creators to manually opt out if they don't want their videos and audio included. The decision has drawn backlash from creators, with Twitch's own product chief acknowledging that an opt-in system would likely attract almost no participants.
"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,'" said Twitch Chief Product Officer Mike Minton. "Well, there's an honest answer... If this was opt-in, nobody would opt in. That's honestly the answer." TechCrunch reports: For Amazon, these stream recordings are incredibly valuable, offering thousands of hours of audio and video content to help train AI models. But Twitch users worry that since creators have to manually opt out, they might be surrendering their content to train Amazon's AI content models without even knowing it. This is especially concerning on a platform like Twitch, where creators are often recording livestreams of themselves and their voices for many hours per week.
[...] Twitch knows that its community of streamers is largely opposed to the use of generative AI, since the most prevalent generative AI products are trained on books, images, videos, and other materials scraped from the internet without consent. Even Twitch's approach to breaking this news shows that the company is braced for backlash. Instead of telling the community that Amazon would begin training on Twitch users' content, Twitch framed this change as "[adding] a setting that lets you opt out of having your channel content used to train generative AI content models across Amazon."
In some cases, this created confusion among streamers about whether their content had already been fed to Amazon without their knowledge. When one user asked if their videos had already been used for training, Minton responded, "I don't actually know the answer to that question because I don't know what Amazon [...] has done in terms of model training and what they've used and not used."
"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,'" said Twitch Chief Product Officer Mike Minton. "Well, there's an honest answer... If this was opt-in, nobody would opt in. That's honestly the answer." TechCrunch reports: For Amazon, these stream recordings are incredibly valuable, offering thousands of hours of audio and video content to help train AI models. But Twitch users worry that since creators have to manually opt out, they might be surrendering their content to train Amazon's AI content models without even knowing it. This is especially concerning on a platform like Twitch, where creators are often recording livestreams of themselves and their voices for many hours per week.
[...] Twitch knows that its community of streamers is largely opposed to the use of generative AI, since the most prevalent generative AI products are trained on books, images, videos, and other materials scraped from the internet without consent. Even Twitch's approach to breaking this news shows that the company is braced for backlash. Instead of telling the community that Amazon would begin training on Twitch users' content, Twitch framed this change as "[adding] a setting that lets you opt out of having your channel content used to train generative AI content models across Amazon."
In some cases, this created confusion among streamers about whether their content had already been fed to Amazon without their knowledge. When one user asked if their videos had already been used for training, Minton responded, "I don't actually know the answer to that question because I don't know what Amazon [...] has done in terms of model training and what they've used and not used."
If this data is as valuable as they claim (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: If this data is as valuable as they claim (Score:3)
Not that Twitch has much choice here. I guarantee this is being pushed on them from Amazon. I think that is why the Twitch execs are being so blunt with how they are communicating it.
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If the original ToS on Twitch grants Amazon a license to create derivative works then they don't have anything to worry about.
It's like your local superstation had the rights to run ads on Star Trek in addition to the license fee they paid but they didn't therefore get a right to create a new Star Trek series or publish a "Best Moments of STTNG 1989" show around the holidays.
Now if they had gone to Paramount about the Best-Of show in theory they could have negotiated a license for that, having already been
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All user generated content services let you grant them a perpetual, irrevocable, ... (but at least non-exclusive) license to your content. In principle they already have all rights. I think they use opt-in/opt-out for AI for things like personality rights that may not be covered. If you don't opt-out out, you are responsible for any person in your stream having consented to be part of the training data.
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They want to show something
And their viewers presumably want to view it.
I think there are a few reasons we have landed on the model we have.
1. People don't like unbounded liabilities. This is scary enough with regular web-hosting but given the huge size of video files, hosting them on your own website was frankly terrifying.
2. Most people (both viewers and creators) don't' want to pay actual cash for messing about online, so ad-driven services rule the roost, it's much easier to do that if you have scale.
3. Many of the major platfor
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Why? They can start doing so when everyone opted out. As long as they can get it for free, there is no reason for them to want to pay for it.
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"Then they should offer to license and pay the creators for it."
That's crazy talk, read a few articles about this one, they can even take liver cells from you and grow organs without compensation nor consent.
"That's honestly the answer." (Score:3)
"Well, there's an honest answer... If this was opt-in, nobody would opt in. That's honestly the answer." - Because no one wants to train your bullshit AI. Hey, here's an idea, PAY the creators for their work to be included in your AI nonsense. Stop raping people already.
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Just wait until it starts training on porn that people managed to upload to Twitch in violation of the terms and conditions. Then your use of the word "rape" in that comment will take on a whole new meaning.
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As for suggesting they pay the streamers, you could argue things in reverse as well. The streamers
Garbage In, Garbage Out (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't fathom anything on twitch helping train AI except as an example of how not to speak or behave.
Re:Garbage In, Garbage Out (Score:5, Funny)
They need content for the hallucinations.
In a sane world... (Score:1)
In a sane world companies would by default cut actual money checks to people they scrapped their data from..... anything less is grounds for ending their existence.
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The only way they would be cutting any checks is maybe if users were all subscribers. This is true for a lot of social media. Make it a subscription thing and get rid of the more insidious stuff. Alas, these days, they would keep all the bad even with a subscription service. Greedy motherfuckers.
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Incentivize opting in (Score:1)
Ideally, pay cold hard cash to opt in.
Second choice would be to provide some real add-on value to opt in.
What's really going to happen if opt-out becomes too toxic for twitch: They will go opt-in but enshittify the product for those who don't opt-in, touting a "better" (meaning maybe as good as August 2026) experience for those who opt in.
Sort of like the "opt in" toll roads in places where the free roads went from being decent to dangerous due to "lack of funding" to pay for maintenance.
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Someone above already copy/pasted the TOS. Basically, if you upload a video to our platform, it's our video now. People agreed to this when they registered.
The user could of course go setup their own website to stream their content from and then advertise like any other business would. Of course, that's a lot more work then using someone else's platform.
This was always a predictable outcome regarding AI training given the last few years.
Maybe someone will decide to start a new video platform with a User's B
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That's also standard terms of service.
> By sending, uploading, displaying, posting or transmitting Content to any area of the Sites, you grant us and our subsidiaries, affiliates, agents, employees and designees a worldwide, non-exclusive, sub-licensable (through multiple tiers), assignable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to link to, reproduce, distribute (through multiple tiers), adapt, create derivative works of, publicly perform, publicly display, digitally perform or otherwise use such Co
Ditch Twitch (Score:1)
I guess I'll have to find a different venue to stream from/to then. Goodbye, Twitch. That simple sentence has a rather resounding sense of finality to it for me.
Last I Saw Twitch (Score:3)
The last time I saw anything on Twitch it was a stream of somebody playing a game and a chat room full of utterly incomprehensible nonsense, gibberish, and emojis scrolling by at an unreadable speed.
Are they training the AI to be schizophrenic?
It blows my mind that anyone watches that shit. Yet, they seem to have an insane amount of users.
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At this point, they are getting desperate for anything non-AI generated to train AI on.
AI is a guaranteed Monopoly (Score:3)
Basically the major platform holders are going to be the only ones who can differentiate between human beings and AI slop and without the ability to do that any up and coming AI product is going to be trained on freely available data on the internet which is so completely full of slop that the end result is going to be garbage.
AI was a one-time Gold Rush for a couple of companies and everyone else is going to be either microsoft, google, Amazon because they own twitch and then a handful of people like Twitter and Reddit will have half-assed systems that don't work except for specialized use cases like how Twitter will let you undress people you shouldn't be undressing and we let it do that because the owner is above the law...
I've said it before and I will say it again AI is a antisocial technology. It will do nothing but eat jobs and water and electricity while putting a handful of psychopaths in a position of even more power over you. We already had machine learning models for the actual useful scientific stuff. When folks say AI what they mean is something that can replace people that work for a living at enormous cost to society.
And as usual the people getting the benefit won't pay that cost, you will.
There’s no opt-out (Score:4, Insightful)
None of the AI companies have complied with their TOSs. They’re basically unenforceable for individuals. “Opting out” is privacy-theatre. The AI companies are in a brutal war to build and train their models. The’ve hacked their competitors and flagrantly violated every copyright law on the planet. They’re not gonna let some vaporous pinky promise TOS get in the way.
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> None of the AI companies have complied with their TOSs. They’re basically unenforceable for individuals.
The point of ToS is not that they can go to court to sue you. The point is that you cannot go to court to sue them. If you break the ToS they just close your account. But if they train on your data, you lose in court when you claim they were not allowed to. Don't think you've got a loophole, the ToS were written by lawyers, they know how to phrase it so it holds in court.
Time to leave twitch ... (Score:2)
... and no more itch. Or you become amazon's bitch.
Learning from data doesn't require consent (Score:2)
Legally or morally.
I'm really surprised how many people around here think it does. It doesn't require consent when a human does it, and it doesn't require consent when a computer does it.
Possibly not just streamers (Score:2)
It's not clear that this is limited to just twitch streamers. If you are a user (aka chat) this option is also in your settings.
Modern Corporate Mentality in a Nutshell (Score:2)
"We know nobody would choose this, so we're going to force it on them and hope nobody notices."
Remember when companies had to make something that people wanted to exchange money for? Instead of trying to dictate every aspect of life to people and then wondering why nobody loves them for it?
Pepperidge Farms would remember, but they were too busy trying to tell you you should remember, and buy more cookies.
Probably already too late (Score:2)
I would guess that in the time between Amazon adding the option to opt out and the user actually clicking the button to turn it off, even if it's only 5 minutes, all that user's previous content would have already been used for training, possibly just by copying it to the AI learning material server.. Technically, you hadn't opted out yet, so it's fair game from their perspective.
Why would u NOT want to train AI? (Score:1)
In the end, AI learns from us, so if everyone with "data concerns" does not train AI, then the resulting AI will be trained only on those that don't care.
Make sure to let your thoughts, concerns and reasonable thoughts be public to be crawled by an AI. .. look at it maybe like 'ai is a child of humanity, it learns and trains it's understanding on all knowledge out there in the internet', so we will get what we post.
Lets try this one (Score:2)
Why are you stealing? That is what everyone asks me. Let's be honest here. If I took donations, nobody would donate to me. That's why I steal.
Has the same vibe to it. Smh.