This shift involves thousands of hours of creator-led content, including personal likenesses and voices, which Amazon considers highly valuable for developing its AI technologies.
The decision has triggered significant pushback from the streaming community, who expressed concerns about their work being used without explicit consent.
During a live broadcast, Twitch Chief Product Officer Mike Minton acknowledged that the company chose an opt-out system—where users must actively change a setting to decline participation—because they believed few creators would volunteer if the system were opt-in.
This move reflects a broader trend in AI infrastructure development, as companies like Meta also utilize public social media posts to train large-scale models, often making it difficult for professional creators to protect their data while maintaining a public profile.
Streamers who wish to prevent their content from being used must navigate to their channel's security and privacy settings to disable the "training for generative AI" option.
Twitch executives stated that while they do not have specific details on whether past content has already been processed by Amazon, the new setting is a direct response to community feedback.
This mechanism specifically affects creators who record and archive their live broadcasts, as these videos serve as the primary source material for Amazon’s generative AI content models.