When Twitch announced that streamers could opt out, thousands of users questioned why their content was being used to train AI models in the first place. Twitch has updated its account settings to let streamers opt out of having their content used to help train the artificial intelligence models of Twitch's parent company, Amazon. Although the move has reassured some creators, it remains unclear exactly when the streaming platform began using the posts, streams, and videos of its users to train Amazon's systems. The revelation is raising new concerns about how big tech companies handle their users' data . The opt-out process is simple.

Safety Net Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Look Up Creator Hub Versus Say More Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable Selects Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series Twitch is using your content to train Amazon's AI. Here's how to opt out. It's turned on by default. Sam Haysom is the General Assignment Editor, UK, for Mashable. He covers entertainment and online culture, and writes horror fiction in his spare time.

Twitch has been criticised by users after it emerged the popular streaming platform allowed their content to be used to train Amazon's artificial intelligence (AI) models. Amazon owns Twitch and a setting allowing the US tech giant to take data generated by creators and audiences to train AI is turned on by default. Users can now opt out of that, Twitch said on Wednesday, but the announcement sparked a backlash with some users questioning why it was allowed in the first place. Twitch's chief product officer Mike Minton, said it's respecting users by letting them opt out but on why data was collected by default, he admitted: If it's opt-in, nobody would opt-in. Users who remain opted in could have any of their channel content used for training, Minton said during a livestream, adding that the data collected will not be re-sold to other companies.

Twitch has updated its account settings to let streamers opt out of letting Amazon (Twitch's parent) train generative AI models on their content. Some may not have realized this setting was automatically enabled on their account -- which is deeply gross -- but at least they can now tell Amazon to shove it if they are anti-genAI or just don't want to let the company exploit their labor. A support page notes that, if a streamer opts out, their streams (and on-demand versions of those), clips, stream chats and any other text and images on their channel won't be fed into Amazon's models in the future. The purpose of these models, Twitch says, "is to generate or synthesize text, audio, images or video." Streamers' content may still be used for other AI- or machine learning-powered purposes, including automated captions. Twitch notes that its AutoMod tool doesn't retain users' data or tap into that to generate any material.

The Twitch streamer could pivot from influencer to candidate. But he tells WIRED's podcast he'd rather use his platform to tell Dems "you can't podcast your way out of this problem." Hasan Piker is many things to many people. They don't all feel the same way about Piker or his politics, but most presumably agree on one thing: He is a relentless human being. Most days a week, you can find the 34-year-old Twitch streamer talking to his audience, often for six to nine hours at a stretch. And during President Trump's second term, there's plenty of that to go around. He has nearly 3 million followers on Twitch and has hosted conversations with Senator Bernie Sanders and US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He claims his election night stream in 2024 reached a staggering 7.5 million viewers. On this episode of, I talked to Piker about his looks, his love of Italian sandwiches, and any future political aspirations he might (or might not) want to tease. It's great to be here. I heard you were just at the gym. Yeah, I was at the park. Some days I take my dog and I play a little bit of basketball and get to hang out with some people.

To meet the demands of content moderation, online platforms have resorted to automated systems. Newer forms of real-time engagement($\textit{e.g.}$, users commenting on live streams) on platforms like Twitch exert additional pressures on the latency expected of such moderation systems. Despite their prevalence, relatively little is known about the effectiveness of these systems. In this paper, we conduct an audit of Twitch's automated moderation tool ($\texttt{AutoMod}$) to investigate its effectiveness in flagging hateful content. For our audit, we create streaming accounts to act as siloed test beds, and interface with the live chat using Twitch's APIs to send over $107,000$ comments collated from $4$ datasets. We measure $\texttt{AutoMod}$'s accuracy in flagging blatantly hateful content containing misogyny, racism, ableism and homophobia. Our experiments reveal that a large fraction of hateful messages, up to $94\%$ on some datasets, $\textit{bypass moderation}$. Contextual addition of slurs to these messages results in $100\%$ removal, revealing $\texttt{AutoMod}$'s reliance on slurs as a moderation signal. We also find that contrary to Twitch's community guidelines, $\texttt{AutoMod}$ blocks up to $89.5\%$ of benign examples that use sensitive words in pedagogical or empowering contexts. Overall, our audit points to large gaps in $\texttt{AutoMod}$'s capabilities and underscores the importance for such systems to understand context effectively.

Nvidia is mighty proud of G-Assist, its new "AI" companion that runs on top of an active game and helps you out with tips or hardware adjustments. Now, it looks like the company is preparing to expand its capabilities. A new plugin-making system and several examples are already letting the tool's tendrils expand to other services. While standard developers can already use the G-Assist API, Nvidia is hoping that more regular users will get in on the action, and has made a Plugin Builder to achieve this. Using ChatGPT's generative code capabilities, it allows even a complete novice to "vibe code" and connect it with anything that also has an open API or a similar setup.

If Claude Plays Pokémon is supposed to offer a glimpse of AI's future, it's not a very convincing showcase. For the past month and counting, Twitch has watched Anthropic's chatbot struggle to play Pokémon Red. Across multiple runs, Claude has failed to beat the nearly 30 year old game. And yet for David Hershey, the project's lead developer, the showcase has been a success. "I wanted some place where I could understand how Claude handles situations where it needs to work over a very long period of time," Hershey explains to me over a video call.

We present a novel digital humanities method for representing our Twitch chatters as user embeddings created by a large language model (LLM). We cluster these embeddings automatically using affinity propagation and further narrow this clustering down through manual analysis. We analyze the chat of one stream by each Twitch streamer: SmallAnt, DougDoug and PointCrow. Our findings suggest that each streamer has their own type of chatters, however two categories emerge for all of the streamers: supportive viewers and emoji and reaction senders. Repetitive message spammers is a shared chatter category for two of the streamers.

Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday streamed themselves playing an American football video game against each other on Sunday as the two Democrats continued their party's efforts to secure votes from young men just nine days before the White House election. During the stream of their showdown on the latest edition of the Madden game series, Ocasio-Cortez and Walz exalted the importance of regaining Democratic control of the US House, maintaining a majority in the Senate and ensuring Kamala Harris wins the 5 November presidential election against Donald Trump. "We don't all share the same politics, we don't all share the same views, but the need to defeat Trump this year has been my number one priority," Ocasio-Cortez said. She echoed others who have called Trump an aspiring authoritarian ruler and fascist supported by special interests who are exacerbating the ongoing climate crisis. She also discussed how the billionaire owners of the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post prevented their editorial teams endorsing Harris over Trump, referring to it as "a plutocracy mask-off moment".