Twitch opts every stream into Amazon's AI by default

Twitch chief product officer Mike Minton said the quiet part out loud on the August 12 Patch Notes stream: "If this was opt-in, nobody would opt in. That's honestly the answer." The setting he was defending — Training for Generative AI — ships on by default for every account, and it's broad: a channel's live streams, VODs, clips, highlights, chat logs, plus the text and images on the channel page, all eligible to train Amazon models that generate text, audio, images or video.

The escape hatch exists, but it's awkward. The toggle sits near the bottom of Settings → Security and Privacy on the web, and it only covers your own channel. Chat in someone else's stream and their setting decides whether your messages get scraped. Minton also couldn't say whether Amazon had already trained on Twitch video before the switch appeared: "I don't actually know the answer to that question because I don't know what Amazon has done in terms of model training."

Nearly 3,000 creators tuned into the stream, and sentiment ran hard against it — a company shipping a consent control years after the data collection it governs, then admitting nobody would have said yes.

Why it matters: the default is the policy — and platforms sitting on decades of user content have every incentive to make opting out a scavenger hunt.