Twitch is going to train Amazon’s AI models on streamers’ content unless they deliberately go into their settings and opt out, potentially sweeping up a wealth of streamers who either don’t hear about the announcement or follow steps stop it.

On Wednesday Twitch announced a new setting that lets streamers opt-out of the training. The announcement confirms rumors that have percolated over the last week: It is using streamers to train Amazon’s AI models. 

The new toggle says, "Allow your channel content to train generative AI content models at Amazon." All users are opted in by default. It's located at the bottom of users' security settings page. 

Instagram is full of first-person videos of men harassing women in public. They follow a similar script: A man walks up to a woman or group of women in a store, sitting outside a cafe, or walking home from a bar, and delivers a pickup line. The women almost always nervously laugh, react with barely-veiled disgust, or say "fuck off" while he stalks her or refuses to walk away. The men recording these videos capture them with Meta's smart glasses, which are designed to discreetly capture interactions like these and upload the videos to Meta's platforms where the women in the videos are turned into content for "pickup artist" accounts.  

New research reveals this ecosystem works, and how pickup artists (PUA) influencers are using Meta's products, including its smart glasses and social media platforms, to perpetuate a culture of harassment against women.  

University of Sydney researchers Joanne Gray, Milica Stilinovic, Marcus Carter, and Ben Egliston watched hundreds of these videos to learn how pickup artist content creators use smart glasses, and what specific forms of gendered harms these recordings cause. They published their research paper, "Harm Through the '#RizzCam': Smart Glasses, Ambient Capture and Invisible Harassment," online this week as a preprint article.