After announcing their intent to start scraping VODs and livestreams to help train Amazon AI models, Twitch has quietly implemented the controversial feature – leading to a decidedly less-quiet reaction from users.
The setting appeared without any real fanfare within Twitch user’s account details – nestled discreetly under the Security and Privacy tab – unsurprisingly already toggled on and quite ready to scrape your content, as per this post from Zach Bussey on BlueSky:
Oh course the immediate reaction by many was to identify where the setting appeared so they could rush to turn it off, with most musing as to why the setting would not be opt-in to begin with.
Turns out that was entirely by design, with Twitch’s chief product officer Mike Minton actually addressing a deluge of chat messages all demanding to know why they never considered make it user choice – and the response is downright depressing.
Well, there’s an honest answer. And I think most of you probably can appreciate this: If it was opt-in, nobody would opt-in. Um, that’s honestly the answer. So it’s going to be on by default.
I wish I was paraphrasing. Mike legit said the quiet part out loud – they know that people don’t want this, but they just kinda …don’t care.
Plenty of people have clipped this quote, because it’s a pretty dystopian response:
Better yet, further questions directed to Mike added further fuel to the fire, with regards to what happens if an opted-out user streams with an opt-in user – Mike didn’t actually have an answer for this one – as well as ongoing queries as to what are they even allowed to train off. If someone streams Fortnite for 18 hours, does Amazon just gobble up 18 hours of Fortnite? How is that even remotely okay?
So how do you opt out of this yucky option? Here are some steps:
- Sign in to your Twitch account
- Under your profile image, select Settings from the menu:
- Within this area, select the Security and Privacy tab, and scroll down to uncheck ‘Training for Generative AI’:
With that done, you are as safe as you can be in this day and age from the horrors of AI data scraping.
As for the response to this implementation, there’s plenty of discussion online as to how overtly gross the signalling from Twitch management has been for those who enjoy a justified response to customer disrespect. Plenty of long-term Twitch veterans have all said this is the best time to make use of the myriad of Twitch feedback portals, so if you agree that this all sucks you can offer your thoughts via the following options:
We want to hear from you. Are you rushing to disable data scraping? Have some thoughts on how transparently gross this all is? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.
