Twitch, the leading live streaming platform, recently made an announcement that surprised many of its users and fans, stating that its streams will be used to train Amazon’s generative AI model.
In case you didn’t know, streaming platform Twitch was acquired by Amazon in the third quarter of 2014, twelve years ago. The platform has been through some pretty rough patches as a business, but with this announcement, it’s something they themselves are aware is a decision that is not popular with their users.
r/LivestreamFail
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Posted by u/digitalpizza5
Twitch’s Chief Product Officer responds to community criticism over AI training update
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The issue with this announcement is that using Twitch’s streaming content to train Amazon’s generative AI is set to “opt-in” by default. Twitch is aware that this decision will cause many users to express dissatisfaction, and has told users how they can prevent Twitch and Amazon from using their content for this purpose.
Twitch also held a livestream session to talk about this, attended by Twitch Community Manager Mary Kish and Chief Product Officer Mike Minton who answered user questions about why the decision to train generative AI using this content was made, and why the “opt-in” option is selected by default.
Interestingly, the answer given by Mike Minton is that if the training option is not enabled by default, no one using Twitch will enable it for themselves. In the broadcast, they also showed steps on how you can change the settings for using your content to train generative AI:
Go to your account settings by tapping your avatar in the corner of the Twitch website
Go to the Settings menu and then Security and Privacy
Scroll down until you find the Training For Generative AI setting
Uncheck the option
