Can Twitch Train AI on your Game? | Design Club

[music] Good time zone, internet. Hello and welcome to Design Club, the only game design show on the internet that today is talking about streaming and game design. And I know it sounds like this is a streaming problem, but I promise it's a gaming problem. I am your humble host, Will, joined as always by my pal Jeff. Say hi to the people, Jeff.
Hi to the people, Jeff. Hey everybody, I am Jeffrey Zein, studio director of extra credits and extra history and longtime game designer joined as always by my buddy Will the voice of the people and our Twitch overlord. And today usually I say today my expertise is more relevant is relevant because of X. Today it will be somewhat relevant but which being our resident twitch overlord who has some opinions on AI
some just
and some on Amazon. Yeah. Also, just some just a few.

Well, you have a manic look in your eyes more so than most days when we start off this.
I'm really excited to talk about this, Jeff, because like while it sounds like I've gotten out the tin foil and I'm like, you know, drawing my cardboard sign screaming the end is nigh. I think there's a lot of room to talk about this and I think this is a thing that we need to engage with discussion vigorously because I think a lot of people don't know what's up. I think a lot of people haven't thought about the consequences of what's up. Um, and I think that our audience is uniquely positioned to have a good conversation about it. So, we'll begin with we Okay, let's let's begin let's begin with
the beginning.
A be at the beginning. And
that's a tricky part.
Correct. We're going to begin with a definition here because I think this is really important. We're gonna
do we want to lay the groundwork for why we're talking about this?
No, no, no. I I want to do the

definition first for a reason.
Okay.
When we talk about Twitch or we talk about Amazon, most of the time we're going to be using them interchangeably because Twitch is a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon. There is I am aware when we talk about this that though they are not identical companies that there is internal politics of which we are not fully aware that differentiates Twitch from Amazon. But for the ease of conversation when we talk about Twitch or we talk about Amazon, we're really using them interchangeably here. Okay. Uh and I think that that's
is that fair? Like
so
it's a tricky thing because there's wholly owned subsidiaries and there's wholly owned subsidiaries in some cases
because there are definitely companies and like game studios for example
that are owned by a parent company like Monolith Productions was owned by Warner

Brothers.
Sure.
But it wasn't like Warner Brothers was actively breathing down their neck every day
to
That's fair.
do things.
That's fair. In this case though
Mhm. Let's let's talk about what we're talking about and then we'll I'll explain why I think that why we're inevitably in a position of conflating those two things. So,
last week, oh my god, it's only been a week. Deep breath. It's only been a week. Last week, Twitch made a change rather silently to their uh backend profile settings and they added a switch to those settings which
wait Twitch added a switch.
That's correct. And that switch says
which sorry which switch did they add? will tell me
the switch that Twitch added
is that um and this was and I need to stress that this was

opted in by default.
Mhm. And we could talk about that coming up.
Correct. Was um whether or not you consented to have your channel's content used to train generative AI. And again, that was uh you unless you opted out, your consent was automatically assumed on every Twitch channel, whether or not you're a broadcaster, that that that switch was flipped on. And
did it specifically say generative?
I will read you the exact I am now reading you the current uh as of moment of recording text.
Okay? And this is by the way the middle of August of the year 2026.
Correct. Training for generative AI. The option is the option is listed as

allow your channel content to train generative AI content models at Amazon. Turning this off does not opt you out of Twitch and Amazon using your channel content for other purposes described in the Twitch privacy notice, including using AI supported Twitch features that benefit the community by facilitating streamer growth and monetization such as real-time sponsorship, campaign assistance, viewer discovery such as recommendations, and community safety such as automod,
which Nova has very kindly put in the text chat. So, actually, props to I'm guessing at this point Twitch for labeling it clearly
um and not obiscating its name or its purpose.
Yeah. And yes, chat, if you are just now discovering that this is a thing or if you're watching this on YouTube and you have a Twitch account, those settings can be found under your if you click on your uh profile and then you click on the settings uh cog.

It will take you it will take
settings.
Yep. It will take you to a thing that has Yep. a bunch of stuff up at the top. The one you want is security and privacy. If you scroll all the way down um towards the bottom, it's the third from the bottom for me. Uh training for generative AI.
Um and you can
there we go.
You can takeick that off. And again, that was on for everyone. So this is one of the reasons why it's very difficult to disentangle Twitch from Amazon here. The consent is for Amazon to train generative AI, but Twitch is the site where we are
and the site that's governing the optin or out. So, they're deeply inshed here. There is a very real um there's there's a very real um world where we've seen push back already. In fact, when the announcement um

there wasn't an announcement, every week there is a stream called patch notes where uh Twitch staff have a live stream to answer questions and concerns about upcoming features, about changes to the platform, about policy concerns. Normally Dan Clancy, the CEO of Twitch, is on that. He wasn't last week. Can't imagine why. Um and um this is a place for public discussion. Mary,
when was the last time he wasn't on it? Like is this his usually on it?
He's usually he's usually on it. It's not every week, but like more often than not. And like his his absence was conspicuously noticed. Um
Okay.
One of the hosts, Mary Kish, said the following in Twitch chat, which is a very interesting way to do this. By the way,
written or spoken?
Written.
Okay. which means she knows she's on the record because she's a Twitch staff and she's typing something into the written record. Very interesting.

Mhm.
The opt out numbers will help us continue to reiterate that our community is not receptive of AI in any form. I'm sorry, but I am reading your comments and do hear you. So there is there is some uh merit to the notion that Jeff is putting forward that there are there is a difference between wholly owned subsidiaries and wholly owned subsidiaries. Uh and I agree but we don't have enough information to deep dive on that point here. So because Twitch is acting as an interview,
I would having been part of a couple of
Yeah.
corporations um for jobs as well as the indie studios and ones I've started.
Y
that is to me at least fairly unambiguous on that there is at least a strong internal grouping within Twitch that very much does not like this.

Yeah. And and the question is
because Twitch is a company whose usefulness is governed by public opinion.
Yeah.
More so than many other
Yeah. Nova is agreeing with me by the way.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's incredibly strong public push back. Yes. Correct. Um
we don't know how big that push back is. We don't know if that's just Mary Kish or if that's other people involved in Twitch. We we don't. So
I rather than speculating, I am trying very hard to go when we're talking about the baseline to go with this is what was said specifically, right? I'm quoting exact things rather than speculating. But I do agree that there is probably some ser serious push back going on behind the scenes. Um
I would tell you just from that will
I would bet real money, which means I'm at least 80% sure I'd win.
Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. that this means that Amazon said we need this. Twitch

said our users will hate this and Amazon said don't care. Um andor prove it, you know. And they said okay, we will do our best to collect data and prove that you are basically going to be sabotaging us by doing this.
I think that that's a very reasonable conclusion to reach. I I'm I I would not take that bet. Um I I am in agreement with you. Uh, and I I think that there's there's a bunch of reasons why, right? And
we're gonna dive into some of them
uh today. And we're going to we're going to hypothesize a little towards the end about why this would be an absolutely devastating move for the streaming industry as a whole if it were if it's allowed to continue unchecked.
Um,
and let's actually bring this up for the moment. Yeah.
So,
for a moment, let me talk what I call playgrounds.

We're we're using Twitch's playground right now. We're in it sandbox doing stuff. Same as when we post our videos on YouTube or when I've made games on the PlayStation or the Xbox or if you launch it on Steam.
When you use somebody else's playground, they get to set the rules
and just straight up. And that's whether you're making content or coming in as a user.
Yes. If Sony tomorrow decided that they wanted, I don't know, all third party controllers not to work, that would be that.
There is no recourse against that. If Twitch tomorrow decided that they wanted to use everything for generative AI training with no opt-out switch, that's completely legal and within their purview,
right? like the fact that you are using a free service whether or not you pay for a channel or even if you pay for a channel other people's playgrounds they get to make the rules you get to vote with your dollars and you get to vote by leaving and you get to vote with loud

social commentary
but Twitch could have come in hidden it and just started doing it like there is nothing currently illegal about that.
Yeah. And so
scummy
may Yeah. Right. So like and and that's that's the big thing, right?
There's a big difference between illegal,
which this isn't, and scummy business practices that everyone's going to lambast continuously, which this is.
Illegal, immoral, scummy actually. And they can be on a variety. You could be illegal and immoral and scummy.
It's a triangle, right? Yeah. It's the triangle, right? And and you can you could be all towards Yeah. And and that isn't saying that's how it should be. Like it probably should be illegal to opt in people for things like that.
Yeah. But currently
in the world we currently live in with the laws we currently have there. It was fair game
correct
for them.
Yes.
Um and I always like to lay that groundwork because

Yeah. So so we should probably clarify during that patch notes stream. Someone asked why. Someone asked um one of the the Twitch staff
why was this made opt out rather than opt in? And the very blunt answer that they were given by Twitch staff was that if it were an optin process, nobody would opt in,
which and which says a lot both about what they understand about the sentiment and um is a reality, right? Not even because it is a thing that is disliked, but because people don't toggle options unless they have a pressing need to. Generally speaking, most people don't know the plethora of options that are available to them on many of the platforms that they use. Most people don't know that you can tell YouTube to

no longer recommend a video or a channel to you based on the three dots next to the um under the thumbnail on your on your uh like homepage, right? Lots of people don't know that much, right? There's a reason that creators on YouTube tell people to ring the bell because that's a thing that they don't know about the options that are available. So there is a there's a a human psychology point about people don't mess with options and they are aware that no one likes this. Right.
And it's it's funny if you go look at the um some of the articles written about it and this went as Will was telling me and I then looked up this broke containment. Like this was on the BBC, this was on Twitch, sorry, Forbes,
uh this was on Kotaku. And all of them led in with the line of basic, let's see, like what did BBC's line was? Twitch users outrages Amazon uses their content to train AI in opt out feature.
Yes.

Uh Forbes was Twitch admits nobody would opt into AI training. Here's how to opt out.
Yeah. By the way, I'm pretty sure that Twitch staffer is getting sent to mandatory media training because there's [clears throat] no way that Twitch staffer is not getting set to mandatory media training because
I don't know that that goes with that sentiment of we want to show how many people opt out said by their um
Yep. Yeah. Absolutely. So um
yeah, so that line was picked up and run with
Yeah, it was
because they said the quiet part out loud.
Correct. But again, cheers to the Twitch staff for twe,
right? Yes. I I think they've done I think that and it's entirely possible that that was done very calculatedly to get that sound bite picked up to generate negative press for the move so that when they back down they get a claim.
Right. Not going to be happy with any of this. Twitches, right?

Yeah. [snorts]
Okay. So what exactly is being covered here, right? What exactly when we say that uh Twitch's optin covers generative AI content, what is what is that opt in or out covering?
Yeah.
Well, so important note, when you are in a channel, you are governed by the broadcasters option setting. That is to say, if you are here in the Extra Credits Twitch channel, you are governed by our current opt out. Even if you've opted in, this is our tiny playground. This is our tiny sandbox on Twitch's very big playground, we get to decide here. And so, because we've opted out, it's opt out here. That's the first and most important thing I think that a lot of people need to know because lots of pe there's some um confusion on that point. In addition, Twitch has made it clear

that there is no way and this will become relevant to a later point that I'm going to make. So I need to reiterate it then as well as now. There is no public-f facing way to verify whether or not a streamer has opted in or out of this training.
Though to be fair, there's no public way to verify almost any setting that a streamer has turned off or on.
That is correct. The difference being in some people's minds that there should be a way for this to be optin uh the the status to be visible because your behavior may be influenced by that. So you will find many streamers on Twitch have AI opt out as a tag.
That is that is a community um sort of sourced way to say hey we we've opted out of this. If that is a a thing that is of concern to you, you're free to chat here. You're
I just noticed that in our title, which I had not seen before.
Yeah, it it is unobtrusive enough that

if it does not matter to you, it probably won't draw attention. And if it does matter to you, you know what to look for,
right? Um uh yeah. So, um I I I should that it should be a tag currently. I'm showing it as a tag on my back end. So, if it's not showing up for you,
I see it in our title. Can Twitch stream your AI in your game? Design Club # AI opt out.
Yeah. Yeah. It's um and it is also in the tags of the stream properly. Um, but that tag defaults to all lowercase because the first person because Twitch tagging system sucks. Uh, they ruined it. They had a perfectly fine one that needed a couple more tags and instead of agreeing to update the tag library, they said, "No, you can free form tag your own streams, which made the tag system useless." Thanks, Twitch. Anyway, so but what that governs right again

governed by the broadcaster is everything on the channel. So, to pick apart the Twitch terminology for those who may not be familiar, that means all of the art assets on your profile, your profile picture, your banner, your um the the profile boxes below that we often use to communicate rules or where you can support us off this platform or um have a button for charity or whatever, right? Sponsorships, gear, all of that. All of that is in the contents of the broadcast itself would also be included. Everything that comes across that broadcast is is um up for grabs if you've opted in as well as all of the contents of chat because chat is governed. It's part of the channel. So those are the three main parts, right? So we have everything on the profile which has its own problems because

lots of people are sponsored. So they have companies logos on their profile as part of the terms of that sponsorship. So now Twitch is going to feed a bunch of other companies registered trademarks into their generative AI.
That h okay that's kind of that's to me as I begin to think about this logically. That is one of the first signs maybe someone didn't think this through terribly well. So
actually that's pretty amazing. I I'm all for that if they're putting a whole bunch of trademarked and copyrighted things into their system.
Yeah,
one would assume that they have some AI that could maybe sort that out or machine learning.
Sure.
But we'll see. Um
and then uh chat is just a a font of um

organic uh language data in languages from around the world. By the way, people from all over the world use Twitch. There's a thriving South American Twitch scene, which means that there's a vibrant Spanish and Portuguese audience. Um, Dota is huge in Russia. There's a big Russian audience for Dota. And, um, Counter Strike, uh, and Deadlock. Now, Deadlock is mostly in Russian. Um, there's, uh, pretty much everywhere except Korea and China. Korea has its own thing where Twitch is not allowed to broadcast there and China has its own thing where Twitch is not allowed to broadcast there. But pretty much everything else Twitch is there. Uh Twitch is pretty global at this point. So it's a huge font of of actual like organic trading data. And then the last one is where we're going to run into most of the problem here. everything on this screen.

And part of the problem that [music] I bring up here is that everything on this screen is already kind of a legal gray area. Kind of a legal gray area. So what do I mean? This stream contains only things which we are 100% allowed to use. Jeff is here of his own valition. I am here of my own valition and everything on this screen is a art asset generated for the studio by an artist who is paid for the work and we have full rights to that art. Okay, cool.
I I know because I supervised all of the entire construction of this scene here.
Correct. And then Will chopped it all up and put it in manually into OBS.
Correct. But all of this is from Extra Credits, 100% organic, homegrown. Okay. That's that's pretty straightforward.

Sometimes we do reaction videos to our own YouTube content.
We talk we'll pick apart an episode in a while.
Yeah. We'll pick apart an episode. We'll talk about what's in that episode, what we had to leave on the cutting room floor as we break it down. Right.
Okay. Cool. We own all that. Sometimes Jeff and I analyze video games
or things like games, but let's stick just with games for today.
Let's just stick just with games. So, we played blueprints. Do we do we do we have the legal standing to use blueprints in a piece of monetized content? Well, it turns out the answer is maybe.
So, Will owns a legal copy of it.
He bought it on He bought it on uh
Steam.
Steam. Thank you.
Yeah.
Steam and stream were competing in my head for what it was going to come out.

You You think it's bad? I use a device called a stream deck and we frequently talk about the Steam Deck.
Yep. Those get inverted all the time. Continue. [laughter]
Yeah. So Will has a license to play it personally. Um, and Will looks confused, so I will.
No, keep going. Keep going. I was looking to play it personally, but there is a vast legal gray area that no one has really gone to court and there's no exact law around, which is does Will have the right to stream that content? like y
we know that he doesn't have the right to stream a movie because movies are vigorously enforced and fully copyrighted.
Correct. In fact, they're enforced beyond the limits of their actual copyright. Last year for my birthday stream, we did a viewing of a movie in the public domain. Uh the the Vincent

Price movie, The Last Man on Earth, um which was later remade into I Am Legend. Same book, same concept, but the Vincent Price one has been in the public domain for some time now because the copyright is lapsed. It's in the public domain. There's no question about that. We got a copyright strike on YouTube on that video for that section and I had to write YouTube back and be like, actually, this is in the public domain. And they were like, whoops, our bad,
right? So, music and movies are both vigorously enforced,
which is not a bad thing. People go out and make music and they go out and make movies. Like
they are protecting the work of the people who did it. Yes.
And keeping it from just getting put up and streamed and other people basically making money off of something that they didn't make.
Yes.
Like if I went and just put up Lord of the Rings by, you know, Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings on YouTube, that's not fair game.
Correct.

Caveat.
Anyway, getting back to video games.
Yeah. Um uh yes
this is largely unsettled.
Mhm.
That there was a court case over an adjacent field of streaming which was reaction content. So unfortunately or fortunately it was decided before going to trial. it was decided on the merits of the complaint. Um, which in fancy legal terms means that the defendant pointed out that if everything the plaintiff was saying was true, it still wouldn't be a like there there actually isn't a complaint. Um, but uh there have been trials over the fair use of reaction content, right? because that is uh it
it is arguable if that is

transformative.
Correct.
So transformative basically means you're not allowed to take somebody else's stuff and put it up unless you do something. Transformative means you are in some way adding to it to make it its own whole new thing. And even then it has to be wholly transformative. So, for example, if you take a song and remix it, but the lyrics are the same, the lyrics are still copyrighted. That wasn't transformative on those. And so, your song can be issued a takedown.
Yep.
Because you changed something but not another thing that was protected. And so, we have seen on Twitch, for example, some streamers put up other people's videos and walk away to go get lunch.
Correct.
And call it a reaction. that is decidedly not transformative. I've actually watched a good number of videos um I I like a couple of reaction style videos um where people will watch an entire movie and you see them

watching it and occasionally they'll say a thing, but that's not really transformative. I've seen other people that will stop it every 30 seconds to a minute to comment on what they're thinking. like there's different amounts along the way. So this isn't a single black and white. A reaction video is always transformative or not, right?
Because people do reaction videos in a variety of different ways.
Correct.
But somebody just popping up a thing and watching it
probably not transformative.
Okay.
But it's never been taken to trial
to explicitly determine where that fine line falls.
Yeah. So it's very difficult, right? because we're currently in this legal gray area.
We're very much in this legal gray area based on um uh a question, right? Which is, is streaming a video game transformative?

I'm actually very interested in what chat has to say on this as well as your thoughts, Jeff. Let me let me say, however, as as people are spinning up their ideas and thinking about their carefully considered opinions on is streaming a video game transformative, that this is obviously a spectrum. This is clearly a spectrum. There is a wild difference between playing through a very few choices visual novel
and um
Skyrim
with with no commentary and playing Skyrim or brewing a deck in Magic or playing a tournament match of League of Legends or coaching someone in Counterstrike, right? There is a wide variety of things which we might term playing a game but they are it is far from the same in terms of the amount of um active transformation of the original property that goes in. Right. So but on its basic merits is having someone on

screen reacting to the content inherently transformative because that person is also controlling the game. is sort of like the the baseline question.
There's also a followup which is could they own it? So, for example, will we actually got something it was really funny a while ago before I was actually even at the extra credits channel. Um, there was a video made about something where they needed to find some footage and I think it was actually James got lazy and found like a 5-second clip of somebody somewhere who'd played the game and use that to like help show a point off. And like two years ago, we got a note from them being like, "Hey, I own that clip." Because their player name showed up. And I briefly considered saying, "This is somebody else's video game. You don't actually own it." And a video of you playing somebody else's video game is definitely not an owned thing,
right?
Like,
yeah.

And we actually had a deal with that studio who made the game that said we're allowed to use any clip that they made of their game.
Yeah.
But then we I also decided this was a very very old video and it didn't like nobody like I don't even think it'd been watched
because it was like 12 years old. like it was
not something we cared about really and I didn't want to pick a fight with another channel.
But to be fair,
they don't own you don't suddenly own a video. Excuse me. You don't own a footage of somebody else's video game by streaming it,
right? Except it gets weird.
Because we own our likeness rights. So if there's a stream of us playing blueprints
then we do own our own.
This person wasn't on visible was their

username above.
Right. Yeah. Yeah. No. No. For sure. I'm saying that there that that you have a you have what is probably the simplest case of that. Right. I am saying that it gets more complicated than that even with the confounding factor of owning one's own likeness rights.
Right. particularly as they regard to broadcast, right? So, that's a whole layer, right? You don't own the video game, but you do own that, but you might be licensing your alert music. You might have a logo for a sponsor that shows up per sponsorship agreement. Every so often, many streamers are sponsored by drink companies or uh snack companies, right? Red Bull, Advanced GG, uh, you know, there have been popcorn companies that have done sponsorships, right? Or Sunflower Seeds. I'm naming like actual products that I know people who are sponsored by, right? Those logos show up on screen, right? So the the the who owns a stream is kind of

weird because in many ways the closest analog to a stream is not television, it's busking, which is kind of
I was about to bring up TV, but talk tell me about busking. Then I want to bring up TV for a second.
Yeah. So this is sort of like public performance art in a lot of ways. This is more a digital street corner where we hang out and play guitar and entertain you than it is a television station, right? Like from from a pure um uh analog perspective, right? Because the payment model is the same as busking. We're working for digital tips. Reminder that your support here over on Patreon helps keep the lights on. Okay, great. have done the thing. Um, we don't have full control over what happens, right? As much as we might like to.

People can come by and chat and say things, right? We're often in a space where our art is collaborative with other people playing an online multiplayer game, right? We don't have full control in the same way that someone being a living statue on the corner doesn't have full control over their performance space, right?
Um, and
really quickly, um, we will come back to this comment. Like I want to let Will keep going but we will come back to that one.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um and uh then there's this other thing right which is where does your performance space be uh start becoming an area that you can control and stop being you infringing on the sidewalk or impeding traffic on the sidewalk. Right? And so it's this very complicated issue from a practical standpoint, right? While it in many ways resembles

the idea of a television station, I argue that it's not really all that analogous to a television station. But I'm very interested to hear your thoughts, Jeff.
Yeah. Well, it's just um and for a point we're going to come to in a minute. If we were doing a late night talk show on NBC or CBS or
HBO or any other thing,
by the way, any of those networks, call us. We're available. Hit us up. Anyway, keep going. Yeah. Great.
Love [clears throat] to follow John Oliver.
Yeah, it' be awesome. Yeah. [laughter] [snorts]
But realistically for them, everything that appears on the screen has been vetted and owned. Like I I have done occasional things with space around that like wearing high like wearing brands on you know if they have a Coke sitting in front of them. If you watch American Idol and they have you know big jugs of Pepsi on the cups in front of them that is not just cleared that is paid for.

like um they are very careful about what goes on and they license theoretically everything there is licensed the music the clips they're using everything else um or and/or they also have an in-house graphic artist where if they need something that they don't want to go license they will make their own version of it to show on the screen
so they can be like
here's the thing we're talking about. Yeah.
And so Twitch definitely isn't that,
right?
But it's also something very similar for what where we're going to come to.
Yeah.
Um, getting back to Emily Orange for a second, you know, is there not already a ton of copyrighted content and genai models from every on the internet?
Yes. And honestly, there's probably lots of groups scraping Twitch.
Correct. But there is a

not just Amazon owns it and Amazon has a thing where they could just suck all of it down. I would bet on any streamer's channel of greater than X number of concurrents at least a couple of those are bots watching and just scraping that for some black market or excuse me some gray
market um generative AI that they're just training it off of. And I think the the difference here is that we can't that's being done without our consent, right? We can't th this is this is a case where consent is beginning to be established, right? And so we've never had to make the choice before. We've never been given the option to make the choice. And so making the choice is kind of the big deal here. Yes, there are a bunch of practicalities about uh bots trolling the net and scraping large amounts of data, right? There are lots of
Reddit,
Twitch, Y,
YouTube,

anti- Wikipedia.
Yep. Anti- AI art um websites that specifically host art that's anti- AI in nature and glazed. I saw a post where someone proudly proclaimed that they had gone to the effort of specifically downloading all of the art from the anti- AR website and trying to ingest it. Now, it had all been hit with glaze, so you're that's as good as mine on whether or not it actually did anything, but they like tried to do it, right?
So, it's it's sort of an inevitability, right? unless we go to exceedingly high lengths to prevent it. That's not really the subject, right? It's not the practicality, it's the legality. And we're going to get to the legality here in a second.
Um,
but actually, let's tangent for a moment. Yeah. Like
as this also might be a lot of people fighting against the sea coming in.
Sure. Like at a certain point,

even if the legal companies haven't done it, there will be enough gray market that's done it that then sell data models short of laws coming in.
Yep.
With strong copyright that are enforcable worldwide.
Yeah.
Like the EU can put up privacy, which is great, but you know, if there's a company doing it out of China or India,
y
they are not going to care,
right? Unless the EU can somehow enforce the business getting done in the EU territory. Yep.
The same with the United States. The same So, it's a really hard thing because the incentive right now is massive piles of money for doing things that there are no laws specifically giving guidance around.
Correct.
And a lot of companies are like, "Cool, we like massive amounts of money."
Yep. They sure are. And in some cases, it's very hard to argue against massive amounts of money, not illegal.

Yeah. Yeah.
So, I'm just saying like we may be fighting the the good battle against the sea coming in.
Sure. 100%.
But it's still I think worth fighting the good battle and talking about it.
Yeah. Absolutely. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is um I think
I don't I don't have a practical solution today. Like if you if you were tuning in hoping that I was gonna have a practical solution to this problem, I I don't, right? I I'll fully be on that, right? But I want to talk about it and I want to get through all of this to like determine where we're at and what really is at stake, right? Because I I think it's more complicated than a lot of people may. Um
pulling random comments out of chat because Yes. Um
Yeah. No. And chat generally has pretty good comments like
Oh, 100%. I'm just Yeah. So, okay. So, let's speaking of lawsuits and and all of that, how do Twitch streamers not all get sued directly into

oblivion? Right. Okay. Because we just established that we might or might not have rights to stream a thing in a transformative asterisk nature, right? If I uh Yes, Jeff. Reason number one, um, most video game companies are like, "Oh, cool. You're showing off our game. Hey, thank you." I mean,
getting noticed nowadays
is the getting noticed for your game is in some cases more difficult than making the game itself.
Yeah. And so, not always, but often when people stream your game, that is what we would call at least neutral, but probably good publicity
about your game and might encourage other people to go buy it.
Y,
this is not true of all games. We have seen some stats of um certain very heavy story games um may actually have a downtrend in

sales after popular streamers play them because enough people feel like they've kind of gone along for the ride and seen the story.
Yes.
So super heavy story games probably impacted more negatively by streamers. Games like Fortnite or League of Legends or other things with basically infinite amounts of play goes up. games that are heavy on uh personalized skill ceilings, right? It is not uncommon to see people watching streamers play a large amount of Slay the Spire to learn something about playing Slay the Spire as an example, right?
Yeah.
Um
yeah, there are many reasons to watch games getting played. But um in general, most game companies are like, "Hey, cool. Free press,
right?" And then by the same token, if you go out of your way to sue a single streamer for streaming your game, that's so much bad press, bro. Streamers are broke. Streamer, generally speaking, despite the appearance of wealth that

some people attribute to streamers, streamers are broke. They got they got no money, right?
Or let's say 98% of streamers.
Yeah, correct. It And by the way, that's not a madeup statistic. That's by the numbers. 98% of streamers make no money off streaming or make
Did I hit that right?
Yeah, it's about me.
It's about the top 2%.
The the top 10% are like noteworthy amounts of money. The top 2% generally make a affordable living wage off of streaming,
which is wild. Anyway, um so don't have money and it's negative press, right? So now you're getting negative returns
on suing someone, right? You only want to sue someone if you believe that it will be a net positive, right? And now you're not
or you're protecting something. Like if a lot of game companies thought they might be losing their copyright on their material
by letting people stream it, they would probably they there would suddenly be a lot of lawsuits going on because they wouldn't want to lose they would say our

copyright on our material or our trademark depending upon which part you're looking at talking about.
Yeah. um is more valuable than the press we get from it.
Yes.
But that is not currently the case on how it's been recognized.
Yeah. Correct. Uh and then uh the the the last one is sort of a weird one. Most content platforms don't want to get involved in a lawsuit. M
so for instance like Twitch doesn't want to get subpoenaed cuz that's annoying right and if if the records or footage or whatever right Twitch is we joke about Twitch being a small indie company but one of the places that Twitch has tried to save the most money is on headcount so they do not have an overabundance of Twitch staff anymore

they cut a lot of Twitch staff right they rely heavily on volunt unteer labor now, right, through the Unity Guilds um to get to like do creator development programs. They do not have a lot of staff. So, every subpoena they get that they're legally required to like produce data for is annoying. They don't want it. They don't want to deal with it. It's also bad press for them if their name shows up in conjunction with a lawsuit where big music company X is suing Timmy who's 18 and streaming with his friends, right? The they're never going to win the PR battle there, right? Because then it becomes Twitch and Giant Music Company X beat up a small child, right? And like that doesn't look good. So, they don't want it. So, there are a whole bunch of tools that Twitch has preemptively put in place to stop as many of those as possible. The easiest one to see is stream mutes. Stream mutes happen automatically and are not a copyright strike. This is very

important. They are an in-house Twitch methodology to stop um content IDed music from appearing in a place where someone can find it later and go, "Haha, this streamer used 30 seconds of Uptown Funk, get them, get their children and their little dog, too. You're all going to the meat grinder, right?" Like, [snorts] um, so there's a there's a system that they have that mutes that, right? But part of that is that Twitch acts as an intermediary and tries to nip a lot of inf like blatant infringement right in the bud right at the beginning before it even gets to legal action.
And that's also protective.
I would guess that 95% of streamers are not wellversed in
what exactly is legal, what is fair use, and what is not.
Y
and little Timmy doesn't want to have copyright strikes or other things coming
Yep.
at him. And so Twitch's tools are also protective in that nature and that they keep you from accidentally doing

something.
Yes.
That later may come to bite you.
Yep. Correct. And and so while it may seem draconian to some people, I absolutely um 100% agree with Sigman here that they're a protection measure for Twitch and the streamer to prevent lawsuit unnecessary lawsuits. Right. Okay. So, three reasons. Honestly, most streamers have learned how to do splits on audio and other things to um
there is a uh there is a feature built into OBS now. All hell OBS open source program that runs half the world and you don't even know about it. Um where you can upload a second track of audio to Twitch that is the audio that will show up with the VOD. So live you can play music or do whatever and someone would have to catch you doing it live. Um and on the VOD you don't have any of that music,
right? And that is a way that people have avoided it, right? Is it still infringement? Oh yeah.
Do people try and get streamers while

they're live? Yes. Does it happen less frequently? Also yes. So it's like an evasion thing more than anything else. And I'm not condoning it or saying it's good, bad, neutral, whatever. I am merely commenting on the fact that it exists. Okay. Okay. So, with all of that being said, one of the reasons that the the the last reason that streamers don't Well, it's kind of goes back to that first one, right? Streamers have a symbiotic relationship with developers,
right?
Yes. And that's why you actually see a lot of games build in things to help streamers. Correct. So, there are three broad categories of ways that Twitch streamers interact with developers. And we'll just blow through these real quick because the way that this
I'm going to do my usual get up for a second while you go through those.
The the way that this interacts with um what we're about to talk about with Twitch AI scraping is slightly different

for these three. Okay. So, number one, the developer has no idea who the streamer is or that they're streaming. There is no official relationship. This is by far the most common kind of relationship between a developer and a streamer, right? There isn't one, right? There's sort of a silent like, hey, there's a directory on Twitch and the developer might go there and find out that someone is streaming, but that's it. There's no legal relationship. This is incredibly common, right? I just got done playing A Thousand Times Resist. I'm playing Palworld. I just played Blueprints with Jeff. I've played Elden Ring. I have official relationships with any of those studios, right? I own a legal copy of the game that I purchased through Steam or wherever, right? And that is it. But I don't have a legal relationship with the development company. I haven't talked to

anyone. I didn't email uh you know Elden Ring official contact email like hey is it okay if I stream your game and they were like yeah cool that's great right none of that happened right um okay so that's that's the first kind is that the developer does have a specific relationship with some or all Twitch streamers now you can have multiple of these relationships going on at once things like the Warframe partner program right or the Dead by Daylight partner program. Some people who play those games are not in the partner program. Some people who play those games do have a relationship with the development studio that makes that game and they either receive perks uh in-game or maybe they receive social media support or maybe there's even a monetary relationship, but there is a recognized relationship that exists between the streamer and the development company that makes that game. Cool. That one's uh less commonly seen, but still plenty

common. That's the long-term form. The short-term form is here is a key. Would you please play our game the day it comes out to help drive numbers? That's also an officially recognized legal relationship between the streamer and the con and the developer, right? So whether it's long or short term, there can be a relationship. Cool. Great. Awesome. And then the third one is uh that the streamer can be the developer. Think about prime time. Think about um esports, right? League of Riot streaming League of Legends esports. Valve streaming the international, right? Or
and that's even a kind of weirder one because it's like the esports scene for say Riot. Riot is one of the ones that runs an official league.
Yep. or there are other groups that run official leagues that have partnered with the developer or publisher and that's its own whole tangent but let's just say yes for a moment and group them

all together.
Yep. Okay. So those three kinds are are the three major kinds. So where now that we've laid out all of this groundwork, why is there a problem? Well, it's real simple. It's category. It's the first category of streaming combined with uh Twitch and Amazon wanting to scrape all Twitch content for AI. I as a streamer don't have a legal relationship with Blizzard. Don't have one. I I know more than any other player who has a World of Warcraft account.
Okay. But
or the company that made blueprints or we've we've streamed any number of games that streams a rogue game every single week pretty much.
Yeah. So, so now if I have opted in or opted out that is unknown to the company whose game I am streaming because again

there is no publicly identifiable confirmed way to guarantee whether or not a channel's content is being opted in or opted out. And that game is having its footage, its likeness, its assets entered into a generative AI training data set. It not might be, not is getting scraped, right? Amazon has declared their intention to digest all footage on channels which have not opted out. putting it like that very specifically into a generative AI model. And if you're a company, whether or not you like generative AI, that sets off all the alarm bells. Now, we've got a crisis. Not hyperbolically, by the way. This is potentially a crisis

in the streaming space because there's
Tell me why. Because I I have some thoughts on this, but I'm curious like why is this a crisis?
Yeah.
Because streaming exists in a legal gray area. Because streamers may or may not have any kind of legal standing to do the thing that they do, right? And we're still not sure on that, right? Because the fair use claim has never really been tested. It is now entirely possible that companies wanting to make sure that their uh intellectual property is not knowingly and intentionally fed into Amazon's generative AI now say you can no longer stream World of Warcraft.
It is too going back to that topic we'd brought up before. It is now too dangerous based on our um that we want to own all of World of Warcraft because we made it.

Yep.
To let other people put it up on places where it will get sucked into generative AI that we can't combat that.
Correct. And anywhere else there is at least some kind of we didn't consent to that model. Right. But if you know that there are streamers who are streaming your game in public and you know that those streamers content is being ingested, it becomes much harder to say that you were unaware that that relationship existed or was going to happen, right? It becomes much harder to fight that in court if you just let it fly for a couple of years, right? and then say, you know,
I've been thinking about it and I'm trying to figure out how true that is.
Yeah.
Because like remember when I said, oh, you know, if they scrape everything on this page and we have we not that we have a whole bunch of sponsor logos, but if we had a whole bunch of sponsor logos up and say Amazon scrapes in Wizard, you know, Dungeons and Dragons logo.
Yeah, that's a good one.

That has a trademark. like that is very definitively owned.
Yep.
Um it's okay to have So here's the weird thing. Like if I do a Google search for that, their logo is going to show up like
their logo is in a lot of places,
right?
Um so I could easily find their logo and even ignoring if other people are training stuff off of that or not, like their logo is out there.
Yep. So any group sucking in content for generative AI, assuming they're doing it from a variety of places, probably has that.
Yep.
A good AI system probably looks at the little TM or in some cases R or in some cases C dependent registered or copyright and can recognize that it is owned. And my guess is that a lot of companies tell the AI to exclude those pieces

because that while some gray area, those are definitively owned.
Mhm.
And you probably don't want that in there.
Yep.
However, the rest of the video game streaming doesn't have that little R, C, or T up there. Um,
Yep.
on it. And like the qu and it is definitely the company made it. It's there. So, and if a movie can be entirely owned, I assume a video game can be entirely owned on the footage versus the footage,
right?
But also, Blizzard never said, "Hey, AI company, you're allowed to get this. If you took it from somewhere, that still doesn't mean you're allowed to have it." And there's so and and given the case with like what we're seeing in other cases, the the question is whether or not companies think that streaming,

which is a relatively small industry.
I need to stress that in a way that a lot of people are not going to like. Streaming is a relatively small industry.
Yeah.
Right. It is it might be worth cutting streaming loose to avoid giving like an easy way to get this upside. Right? Again, this all comes down to the cold math of is the exposure that they're getting from streaming worth the um risk that they are uh onboarding by doing so. Right? [clears throat] Okay. So, that's one part. The other part is a little more like the other the other two are a little easier to see how there's a problem. Uh if Twitch doesn't offer you a way to verify whether or not you're uh opted in or opted out of training data, then companies can't require that they're partnered streamers opt out,

which may mean that marketing spend on partnered streamers or partnership programs goes down for the same reason, right? And that is a thing that helps hold streaming up, right? And in the same way for um the the large streamers, right? That uh for sorry for self-created streamers, right? Like this is about as safe as we can be, right? We've opted out. We have clear 100% legal coverage rights for everything on the screen. This is me and Jeff talking to you about this subject and still makes me nervous. Cuz that bit where they opted everyone in before they opted everyone out and what Jeff said about the playground, right? VODs are part of those things that they said that they're allowed to train on. So let's
It's too bad I Twitch doesn't really store VODs anymore,
right? That would be really helpful for them except the left hand knoweth not

what the right hand doeth. Um let's say let's let's examine a situation, right? Computers are fast. This is a true statement. Not very ambiguous, not very contestable. Computers are fast. Okay. Twitch could, if they were feeling particularly sinister, push an update to the terms of service that says we changed we changed the language of the opt out. And because we changed the language of the opt out, we've reset everyone's opt- out status to uh opt in because we changed the language and we set everyone to opt in initially. And so for the same reason, we're going to change everyone to opt in. But my VODs are part of my channel. And they did it while I was asleep. And in the eight hours I was blissfully asleep away from my phone, Twitch scraped all of my VODs without my knowing consent and yeeted

them directly into a generative AI. And there is nothing that I can do about that from a legal perspective.
They could say that also they could just do it.
As I said, I'm I'm happy that Twitch is exposing they are doing it and giving you the option to opt out.
Yep. because there's other companies that just do it.
Correct. In fact, the original plan, which we found out later, um was not to have an opt out at all. And the only reason that there is an opt out to this is that there was a massive 12 or 13,000 person user voice. Uservoice is Twitch's feature request forum.
Um where people can log in with their Twitch account and say, "Hey, this is a feature I think would be good for the platform." and it was if you're going to do generative AI, we can't stop you, but you better give us an option to have our content on it or not. Uh, and that user voice they have said is the only reason we got an opt- out switch for this at

all. Um, so yeah, no, we came real close to not having an opt out for this and we might not be having this conversation. We would have to have a very different conversation as a studio if there wasn't the ability to opt out. Right. And like
this is the really hard part because well, it's not like there's a real alternative.
Correct.
Sure. We could switch over to YouTube entirely.
Yeah.
Which is a thing we might then consider.
But
yeah,
I mean is there any real alternative other than that?
No,
they've all died or are crap. Kick is crap. Mixer died. That's it. There's nothing else. People keep saying that they're going to come up with a Twitch killer, but they don't realize how unprofitable Twitch is.
Mhm.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, when you think about it, at the end of the day, the amount of bandwidth that Twitch processes
Yep.
is a lot.

And most people want to watch Twitch for at most the money generated by ads.
Yep. Yeah, it's it's very difficult. Right. So now we're now so again here's the problem, right? The problem is companies may no longer want their content to be streamed if there is a fear that it's going to be fed into the generative AI blender. Second,
this will have the possibility of throwing streaming into the full spotlight of the legal system in a way it has not really been exposed to before unavoidably. because it will now need to become a settled matter of law whether or not the streamer can consent to having their stream ingested this way because
here's an interesting
right could the terms of service of games deny streaming on Twitch yes

because there are
you can write terms of service to do pretty much anything you want
correct and there's already language we um People may not be familiar with this, but many content creators are and reviewers are. There's an embargo where you're only allowed to stream after a certain date. If an embargo exists, you could theoretically set the end of the embargo to the heat death of the universe and that would functionally be the same. And we've already established that embargos are okay. So yes, you could right logically based on current currently established elements that are a part of the streaming culture. Yes, easily. I'd be curious to see actually writing into terms of service like you know or a licensing fee like hey you know streaming this game you know every stream of this game you know we break it into four fourhour chunks you know has a 10 grand licensing fee by clicking on accept you agree to these terms and of

course clicking on accept is the only way to play the game like you could put something very specific in there. Yeah.
And even, you know, if it detects OBS on your computer or something, have that pop up on the game as an extra reminder
just to help enforce the legality
Mhm.
of it.
Yep. Of course, we'd run into
So, you could.
Yeah.
We've never seen anybody do it,
right? But you could. Um, someone asked just a functional question. Is streaming on Google bad? My friends who moved over there seem happy. It's very different and it's a very different vibe. It's it's incredibly different to the extent that it would be a major change. For instance, most of what I stream on Twitch is gameplay and gameplay analysis, and that is not what people know us for over on YouTube. And so, we would need to examine like a third channel, right, or whatever, right, as as an option. There's it is certainly possible. There is a bunch of logistics. And as good as Jeff is at

logistics, he's currently all tied up with the Kickstarter. So, this is bad timing. Um, but yes, there are logistical ways that we would approach it, but
it is a thing we'd have to approach.
Yeah. And there's also no guarantee that um YouTube wouldn't do this or isn't already.
Yep.
Because they're owned by Google. And Google isn't necessarily quite the same Juno evil as they were a while ago. I feel like they still kind of try, but it's not as philosophically ingrained as it used to be. Yep.
But realistically, there is so much video gameplay or gameplay of video games up on Twitch and YouTube that like it's hard to imagine generative AI not being able to be easily trained off of it.
Right?
As I said, this is just Twitch saying it,
right? And and so like let's let's

examine these two perspectives, right? because I think it's really important that we examine the difference here. Um because there are two different angles to come at this problem from one of them is a practical angle, right? The angle that that that Jeff is talking about is the practicality of how much footage there is and how much stuff gets scraped into generative AI on a regular basis. Those are the practicalities of the matter. Right? Mhm.
The the other side of it is the ethical, moral, legality of the matter, right? Which is the in a perfect world where everyone followed the laws and the laws were perfectly just and all of the laws worked perfectly well, what would we like the law to be sort of deal, right? Um, and so the where we're actually going to end up on this is of course somewhere between those two extremes, right? the incredibly practical and uh crunchy like mundanity of it and the [snorts] ethereal philosophical end of it, right? But the

like both of those uh viewpoints of this problem do exist and are coming up in the conversation. So I do just want to keep uh folks in mind of the idea that like both of those things are true and we need to think about both of them without letting either of them dominate the conversation. So, I'm trying real hard to like take Jeff's like argument about the practicalities very seriously even though that's not my primary concern, right? But it is a very good point. Yeah. And then like this is another one, right? There are Twitch channels that um uh show old shows like ALF or Bob Ross. How dare you, Amazon, feed Bob Ross into a generative AI? He's too good for that. How dare you? Your soulless AI will never be able to create happy little trees. I'll fight you.
That maybe it helps make their generative AI better. I feel like Bob

Ross would help teach generative AI some very good things. probably probably make the world with a kinder, gentler generative AI,
right? The kind of AI that does a painting in grayscale because he beats a fan somewhere on the road that says, "I'm colorblind."
God, Bob Ross was too good for this world. Anyway, we're going to stop talking about Bob Ross, but like
Yeah, Bob Ross and
Fred Rogers.
Fred Rogers.
Yeah, right. 100%. So that's kind of where we're at, right? I I I think have I made have I made my position that I think that this is a existential legal threat to streaming clear or am I am I making a jump in logic and that's both to Jeff and to chat. Basically, you're saying the existential threat is because this may feed data that feed imagery and gameplay, etc. that is owned by other companies into training more easily into

training models,
right? With the consent of the people broadcasting it,
right? That game companies now need to say, "Wait, we can't let people stream anymore."
Correct. Or that that that is a possibility. Yes. Mhm.
And that if any company of sufficient size wants to exercise that right,
it may wind up in court establishing that streamers do not have the legal right to stream video game content without the explicit permission of the developers.
The other version
and that would be a problem as well.
My guess is what would actually be established will is that streamers do not have the right to proxy ownership. In other words, and that they don't have the right that them playing a game isn't considered transformative because at that point like that'd be

like me holding up a you know a copyrighted logo and like just because I'm holding it up doesn't mean it is a thing that can be used,
right? And so just saying that, you know, a streamer doing a anybody doing a thing like if if we're watch if we're on TV and it's we're doing the Today Show and there's those big windows out behind them and somebody walks up and somebody's using generative AI or actually no it's NB is N today show NBC?
I think that's right.
Yeah.
Doesn't matter. Like NBC owns the recording of that. If somebody walks up behind the window and holds up a big picture of a Pikachu, NPC doesn't own the Pikachu,
right?
At that point, so just because it appears on screen doesn't imply ownership,
could also kind of follow along on this model here.
And yeah, that that by the way was one of the things that came up when Jeff and I were first talking about this topic

was the idea of the Today Show, right? because this is a and that's why I say that this is more akin to busking than it is to um like a television show, right? Because much like the Today Show doesn't control the space outside their windows,
even though they show it.
Oh, sorry, Jeff. Oh, I realize we've committed an error. There are a whole bunch of people watching this who have never seen the Today Show. I'm going to explain real fast. The Today Show is a show on uh network television. Part of its shtick is that it is shot with a glass background of the streets of New York. You can
Yeah.
Somewhere near Time Square, I think.
It's It's relatively near Time Square. It's actually also really near the um New York uh Nintendo store.
It's like Daily Variety Show.
Correct. And so, um they use the people of New York as the backdrop, right? But it does mean that they don't fully control that space. So someone could bring a copywritten image or a

trademarked image into that space
or be wearing a a Nike t-shirt,
right? Wearing a Nike t-shirt.
It happens all the time,
right? Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Um
Oh,
yeah. Uh
there you go.
Yeah. Rockefeller Square. Yeah. Um and so uh that's another case, right? Could can they feed their own footage into training data because they don't control the part outside their window and it might contain things like that or do they have to have someone vet that there aren't any registered
trademark logo things outside their window when they do that.
So will one of the other things we might see is an argument about transformative because I could see an AI company coming back and saying
Matt has a concrete example. He's run by that window in a Spider-Man suit. Thank you, Matt.
There we go. [cough]
But like I could also see that this brings up transformative because an AI

company could come and argue, hey, will and Jeff plane this blueprints on stream is the transformative and therefore since they did not opt out of this model, we are allowed to suck it in and use everything on screen,
right? Because theoretically, if what we do, not theoretically, if what we do is transformative,
right,
then I'm actually not sure on a legal standpoint if that makes it a distinct [clears throat] enough work to be fair game. There's a lot of gray in here, and this is one of the many, many, many times where law has a hard time keeping up with technology because one moves a lot faster than the other. Yeah, I think that's very true. Like, [clears throat] excuse me, chat. Um,
it was that Spider-Man thing.
Yeah, it was web fluid stuck in your throat.
Yeah, it got me. Um,

streaming has existed in this gray area for so long that one of my fears is it being removed from the gray area in either direction, right? becoming overly restrictive with what you can and cannot stream might do as much damage to the industry as saying that you can't stream anything at all in some ways. And so that's that's why I'm worried, right? I feel like this is that there's a lot of stuff going on here that could materially change the nature of streaming and it might end up fine. It might end up being that like a court [clears throat] says, "Hey, you can't train on streamed data." Now, that might also be bad, by the way, because then Amazon might say that Twitch is no longer worth keeping. Hate the plug,
but very real possibility.

Who knows? Yeah.
Yeah. I think my TLDDR take about take away from this is Amazon thought they were about to get a really nice set of training data from something that they'd invested in and I really think it was the Twitch people who so
tried to throw monkey wrenches in the way.
So here's an interesting point to your point Jeff.
Yeah. We found out that Twitch was going to do this like two weeks in advance from an anonymous source and that's how that user voice got started. Someone got an anonymous tip that Twitch was about to start ramping up generative AI training using their data and gave everybody like a good solid two weeks to prepare. Interesting.

Just a fun fact, which may or may not be related to Jeff's point that Twitch staff had anything to do with us knowing or wanting it to happen or not. But an interesting fun fact is that we knew ahead of time that this was going to happen. And I'm one of the signatures on the user voice that says, "Hey, give us a switch." And by the way, there are some uses that Twitch already has for generative for using training data off of streams that have been what it sounds like good. They've been using it to help make better moderation tools.
Yes.
To help make better discovery tools so that you can actually find streamers you like
um for enforcing content bands um when necessary. Like there are good uses like we've had pattern recognition and large scale learning models.
Yeah.
For a long time,
right? And in some ways aspects of AI are just evolutions of that.
Correct.
They do functions that we as a community have said, "Yeah, that is generally useful."
For here's a great example, text

analysis, right?
Um, automod is a very necessary function of streaming in a space. It catches a whole lot of slurs. It catches a lot of slurs. So many slurs. I need you. I've seen the list of slurs that Automod can catch. It's more slurs than you know exist. Almost guaranteed, right? Okay, great. Awesome. One of the ways that they uh one of the things that it can do with pattern recognition is find new ways that people creatively try and spell, misspell, use character substitution or punctuation or whatever to get around the ban on saying a slur. Choose your favorite slur. Imagine all of the ways that someone could try and evade a text filter for it. Someone's tried that.
And you know what? Even a little bit big brothery, they can look at one user who hops between channels doing that a lot
and be like, "Oh, this user is not acting in good faith."

That is correct. Yeah. And so, uh, Automod can begin to analytically learn from the from all of the chat to figure out. And we've gotten smart detection. And sometimes smart detection is still a little heavy-handed, which is why uh sometimes if you get smart detected here on Twitch, the mods will just let it through because it just requires a manual check. But that is a good example of a tool that uses machine learning to help improve our lives on the internet demonstrabably right and that's good.
Yeah.
Yeah. So there are but um the generative AI so will my theory here is that the Twitch staff again don't actually want generative AI.
Yeah.
Because they're worried about a content slop in the same way YouTube is having to fight against it.
Yep. and B worried that Amazon may at some point just be like, "Oh, we'll just

run our own talk show or we'll run our own Twitch streams with generative AI. We don't need real people anymore. Twitch, you're no longer, you know, we're going to there'll be two people left to Twitch. It's been cleaned out and all of the really popular things are AI avatars doing what all of the popular streamers used to do."
Yep. Like that is a real possibility and I think Twitch is probably terrified of that or at least the people who work at Twitch.
Yep.
Yeah, I think that's very true. [clears throat] I I am hopeful that you are correct that Twitch chat the Twitch staff is on our side. It doesn't want this any more than we do. and that the Twitch staff may not always be on everyone on the streamer side, but in this case, I think they are more aligned than not. That is just my reading from the little tiny clues spread from down what we've seen.
Yeah, I feel like we're we're, you know, doing the Helms Deep thing, right? And

and that there's the oncoming tide of Amazon, right? As I never thought I'd die side by side with Twitch staff. What about side by side with a friend? I I could do that. [laughter] Like it's that right. Like okay, sure. Like we're Yeah. So yeah. Uh that's that's where we're at as of
this is also fair, Richard.
Yeah. [clears throat] Yeah. Enlightened self-interest is a good way to put it, I think.
So
that's also true of a majority of the companies we interact with.
Yep. That's very true. Very, very true. all the time. I think I think that's all I had for this. Jeff, did you have did you have any other thoughts? Chat, did you have any other thoughts that we didn't get to? Um, do you do you agree? Do you think I'm overstating the case? Do you think I'm screaming that the sky is falling? Is my name will Will Chicken Little credits now? Like,

yeah. No. And I'm I'm 100% on this, Evan, right? Like, I don't want I if a person wants to use generative AI to make their game, that is their choice, as is my choice whether or not to buy that game and to have it disclosed. Okay, great. Awesome. Equally true. I want the person who made that game, that piece of art, to retain full control over whether or not it is used to make other games. And I want that to be true [clears throat] whether or not it's AI doing the making, right? That seems to be a thing that like people get lost in the sauce, right? Where like with games, they're like, "Oh yeah, I totally ripped all of the assets out of this game I don't own and then used it to make a new game." That's not okay. So why would it

be okay when AI does it? I don't get that one. I'm still lost on how it's suddenly okay because a robot did it. Very not okay with that. Right. So that's that's where I'm at. I would like more consent opt out opt in options everywhere. Jeff, [cough and clears throat] tell us about a calendar Kickstarter that's ending on Friday.
See how subtle I was? Will not subtle at all. Hey everybody, I am going to put on my game designer hat off, studio director hat on to tell you the last time on Twitch for this whole year. Actually, Madam Will will get to tell you about a little on Friday, unless I also crash that, which I might will. Just giving you the warning.
Okay, now I got to set up a whole different set of stuff. Keep going.
Um that um we have our third Kickstarter up. It is for next year's calendar. This is this year's calendar that we do a history calendar Kickstarter. We've done it for the last couple years. Every single piece of art in here is

humanmade. This [clears throat] is by David Huso and Voodoo Val. Every piece is an in has an is an homage to a famous piece of art from the real world redrawn and redone by our own artists. All of them are based on extra history episodes or extra mythology episodes that we have done in the past. Every calendar, every single day has a historical fact. the days with little pictures. If you scan the QR code here, we'll take you to videos we've done about it. And this is part of how we keep our studio going over the year is by selling history calendars. So, if there's a link in chat, we would love to have you come join us. This ends Friday morning early.
Yep.
And along with that, you can also get Extra History playing cards for the first time ever. Extra History fridge magnets. And puzzle number two. This is puzzle number one, Zoe Noah from last year's calendar, which I love. This year we have a really nice Jon of Arc one, which is an homage to Oilia, which is a

great piece of art. Voodoo Val knocked it out of the park on that. So, there's cool stuff going on, and we would love to have you come join us. We're at um I think over 1,200 backers at this point, which is a lot for selling a calendar. It it continually humbles me that there are more than a thousand homes around the world that'll get to see something that we made every day. That that's that's really just
the plane cards. Yeah, the playing cards are really freaking cool. So anyway, all of that, please come join us if you're at all interested. And they also make really good um honestly holiday gifts.
I've given a couple of calendars um to friends and family.
Yep.
Because it's fun.
Yeah. All right. Uh, we will be back on Friday with a Games for Breakfast. Uh, we probably won't talk terribly much about this on Games for Breakfast because we talked a bit about it last week with Patch. If you haven't seen that, go check that out. Um, but we'll be back on Friday with a Games for Breakfast uh, with me and Matt talking to you about this week's gaming and tech news. So, please join us for that. We'll

be back next week with another um, design club. So, please look forward to that as well. Uh, I think that means that all that's left is uh, to say bye to the people, Jeff. Bye to the people. Jeff. Thanks everybody. Have a great week. [music]
[music]