AI is still weighing on streamers at Twitch’s biggest event of the year

Resumen detallado

Months after Twitch sparked backlash for allowing Amazon to train AI models on streamers’ content unless they opt out, some TwitchCon attendees remain skeptical of the technology.

Those were some of the reactions from TwitchCon attendees who encountered a surprisingly prominent presence on the expo floor at the streaming platform’s annual convention: OpenAI.

The company behind ChatGPT had set up shop to promote its Codex coding tool through a hackathon at the event, which brings together Twitch personalities, their fans and industry experts to discuss the future of streaming.

But the booth drew criticism from some attendees who remain uneasy about AI’s growing influence over their creative work.

“No one wanted this, and we made that clear,” one Twitch user wrote on X over the weekend, sharing a link to a forum for the community to call on Twitch to end its partnership with AI companies.

The negative response from some toward OpenAI’s activation came despite AI being largely absent from TwitchCon’s official programming. The technology remains a divisive issue among streamers, with some eager to experiment with new tools and others concerned about the implications for human creativity and jobs.

But at the San Diego convention this weekend, some streamers said they feel AI tools — such as speech-to-text, auto-captioning and clipping — could be helpful as long as they’re not used to generate content and replace human creativity.

“I do think it’s useful in a sense of accessibility for people who may not be able to do certain things,” said TwitchCon attendee Chloe Van Ryn, 31, from Arizona. “I think it could be good for moderator tools or pinpointing new users or things like that, if AI could track that. But I think if it was anything within a creative sense, I really don’t know if it’s a good place for Twitch.”

Van Ryn said she’s suspicious about Twitch’s approach to its streamers’ content after it introduced its controversial opt-out toggle. She said she wouldn’t be comfortable with her own content being fed into AI models.

“It’s like the same as [when AI companies are] taking books and scanning them and then just completely destroying them,” Van Ryn…

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