Amazon and Twitch Face Class-Action Lawsuit Over Opt-Out AI Training Setting

“Defendants’ actions were not only unlawful, but an unconscionable attack on the community of content creators whose content is used to fuel the multitrillion-dollar generative AI industry without any compensation,” the suit reads.

“Content creators such as Plaintiff and the Class Members will never be able to claw back the intellectual property unlawfully copied and used by Defendants to train Amazon’s generative AI. Once AI ingests content, that content is stored in its neural network, and not capable of deletion or retraction. Defendants’ actions constitute abuse and exploitation of content creators’ work for Defendants’ profit.”

Damages sought include “all available contract damages, including actual, compensatory, consequential, and nominal damages, together with such other relief as the Court deems just and proper,” though no specific monetary amount was mentioned.

Twitch, for its part, has defended its stance on automatically opting creators into Amazon’s AI training. During a ‘Patch Notes’ stream that was broadcast that same day, Twitch’s chief product officer Mike Minton responded to questions about the setting, saying plainly: “If it was opt-in, nobody would opt in. That’s honestly the answer.”

Twitch’s Account Settings FAQ explains that it trains Amazon’s generative AI on users’ content for things like “[refining] models that create speech to text, which would help improve captions at Twitch but would also help improve captions across Amazon,” and “AI-supported features, like captions, which automatically generate captions for your Clips but does not retain your stream or your clips to train a model that can generate new content.”