Mary Kish, Twitch's Head of Community, Acknowledged During the Announcement That the News Would Not Be Well Received

Amazon is training its AI models on Twitch livestreams, and the company confirmed the practice on Wednesday while announcing an opt-out feature for users. The disclosure, made during a Twitch livestream, drew immediate backlash from streamers and viewers. Mary Kish, Twitch's head of community, acknowledged during the announcement that the news would not be well received.

"We don't expect you to be happy or excited about this, she said. "I don't expect anyone to react to this favorably. Her prediction proved accurate as the live chat filled with hundreds of anti-AI messages.

Several prominent Twitch streamers criticized both Amazon's AI training on their content and the opt-out system, which automatically enrolls all users unless they manually disable it. "EVERYONE make sure to turn this off and tell Twitch we don't want this crap! user Legundo wrote on X. Twitch chief product officer Mike Minton said he was unaware whether Amazon had already used Twitch livestreams for model training.

"I don't know what Amazon in this case has done in terms of model training, and what they've used and not used, Minton said. "I'm not responsible for Amazon's training efforts. Kish and Minton framed the opt-out setting as a privacy feature unique to Twitch.

"Almost any publicly available content is being used for model training in one form or another, whether permitted or not, Minton said. Users can disable the feature by adjusting a slider at the bottom of their privacy settings page. Minton noted that Twitch uses AI for captions, clips, and content classifications but does not employ generative features.

Amazon, which acquired Twitch in 2014, has been rapidly expanding its AI infrastructure as it shifts focus to compete with frontier model developers like OpenAI and Anthropic. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.