"If It Were Opt-In, No One Would Join" — Twitch Employee's Comment Backs Up Lawsuit's Claims

"If it were opt-in, nobody would opt in." Those words came from Twitch's Chief Product Officer Mike Minton, and they're now the most damning piece of evidence in a class-action lawsuit.

Connecticut streamer Warren Pandiscia filed a class-action lawsuit this week against Twitch and its parent company Amazon. According to Courthouse News, which first broke the story, the suit alleges the companies used his Twitch streams and videos as "training data for Amazon's AI products" without authorization or consent.

The timing here is worth noting. Earlier this month, Twitch Support announced on X that streamers would get a new setting letting them "opt out" of having their channel content used to train Amazon's generative AI models. Shortly after the announcement, a viewer on Twitch's regular show Patch Notes pressed the issue: if the goal is to protect creators, why is the setting on by default, requiring users to turn it off, instead of off by default, letting people choose to opt in? Minton's answer: "If it were opt-in, nobody would opt in."

That line has now made its way into the lawsuit. The complaint argues that Twitch and Amazon's practices amount to a breach of contract, treating streamers as "free training material to feed commercial AI products unrelated to the streaming platform." It also alleges the two companies profited from the practice while streamers "lost money or property" due to "unlawful, unfair, and fraudulent conduct."

Amazon isn't the only company facing legal action over using creator content to train AI. Earlier this year, three YouTubers filed a class-action suit against Apple, alleging the company scraped copyrighted video content to train its own AI models.

The lawsuit is still in its early stages, and Twitch and Amazon have not yet issued a public response to the allegations.