Twitch And Amazon Hit With Lawsuit For Training AI With Streamers’ Content

A streamer has taken a stand against Twitch and Amazon using his content to train AI models. Warren Pandiscia, a streamer based in Connecticut, filed a class action lawsuit earlier this week, as first reported by Courthouse News. The complaint accused Twitch and Amazon of not obtaining licensing or permission before using his Twitch streams and videos as a “dataset necessary to fuel Amazon’s AI products.”

Earlier this month, Twitch Support posted on X that it added an option to opt out of “having your channel content used to train generative AI content models across Amazon.” Shortly after, Twitch hosted an episode of its recurring Patch Notes stream where Mike Minton, the company’s chief product officer, said “if it was opt-in, nobody would opt in,” when asked by a viewer why the Twitch settings for AI training aren’t opt-in but instead enabled by default, requiring users to opt out if they don’t want to participate.

Now, the latest class action lawsuit claims that Twitch and Amazon committed a breach of contract when the companies decided to use its streamers as “free training stock for separate commercial AI products.” The complaint also accused the two companies of benefitting from their streamers, who “lost money or property as a result of defendants’ unlawful, unfair and fraudulent practices.” 

Amazon isn’t the only company that’s been hit with a lawsuit for allegedly using content creators for AI training. Earlier this year, three YouTubers filed a class action lawsuit against Apple, accusing the company of scraping copyrighted content to train its AI models.