Fuck AI – On Twitch and Mozilla not caring about consent

Not too long ago, Twitch made the news for their decision to train generative AI on user data. Twitch streamers, their assets, their voice and every single chat message users publish are used to train up the very same AI models that might replace streamers in their entirety. Mozilla also did the very same thing. As such, I wanted to talk about AI and Consent… again.

On Twitch

Since not everyone is a fan of AI training using their data for free, Twitch users have the option to opt out of this to prevent getting scraped by Twitch… what’s rather problematic, however, is that the setting is buried in the “privacy/security” settings rather than the creator dashboard or the account settings. It feels confusing and intentionally obtuse, to say the least. Having to opt out of there is weird when it’s an experimental feature.

More importantly, though, if you watch a streamer that hasn’t opted out of genAI training, then your chat messages get used to train AI chatbots and other technologies like that no matter what as your preference (aka opting out of this) is overridden by the streamer’s setting.

So, with that being the case, why is it an account-specific settings when it’s something that affects everyone on your stream as well? That makes no sense whatsoever.

More importantly, though, why do we have to opt out of this setting when all other options on Twitch are on an opt-in basis? Mike Minton, the Chief Product Officer at Twitch, has the answer: The whole reason why it’s on an opt-out basis is that nobody would opt in if it was something to opt into.

On Mozilla

Meanwhile, Mozilla Firefox introduced AI features into the browser, which didn’t get announced anywhere on browser startup whatsoever. This is something I found out recently. There was a blog post about it in February… cool… but most people don’t frequent the Mozilla Firefox blog of all things.

Recently, Mozilla’s new CEO, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo (from now on AED), shared an article where they’re patting themselves on the back for introducing a kill switch.

When they announced AI coming to Firefox, there was a ton of backlash. As such, rather than listening and removing the AI features, AED expedited the introduction of an ability to turn off the AI features.

So, you’re telling me that the option to say “no” was gone initially? That’s such a weird way of doing it. Imagine if they removed the Dislike button on YouTube or Quitting option on cigarettes.

Anyhow, apparently, only 1% of users turned off AI features as a result. Meanwhile, 3% of users turned off specific features.

What do these numbers mean?

I didn’t know that there was AI in Firefox until I recently stumbled across this by accident. When I saw it, I sighed and turned off the AI features. Cool.

“I don’t remember being asked as those features appeared” (to quote AED).

As such, “only 1% of users turned off this setting” doesn’t tell us much because we don’t know how many users actually knew about AI being a thing in Firefox and how many users actually found the setting.

There’s a ton of people who will not care, obviously, but as it stands, there are a lot, too, who do care and suddenly find themselves being counted as pro-AI folks or whatever because AED just took these numbers and tried proving his point with it.

Some cynical fiction to conclude this post (this is a parody)

“The most important AI feature may be the ability to turn it off”, AED says at the end while striking a pose until the lights go out, stroking his beard and waiting for everyone in the room to clap… but nobody claps… In fact, there’s nobody in the room. This whole time, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo has been talking to himself because everyone opted out of listening to him. It was in that moment that Anthony learned a vital lesson, but he couldn’t possibly say it out loud just yet. He had to wait a good amount of time first to run it by the marketing team, who could then create a Tumblr-esque statement that sounds profound enough for LinkedIn to eat it up.

The statement is hard to understand, he realised. The PR department didn’t get it whatsoever. Instead, they urged him to not publish the thoughts he came up with. “Clearly, they must be jealous”, AED said as he fired all of these traitors.

Again, alone in his room, AED mutters to himself: “If they don’t know it’s there, they can’t hate it. If I never ask, they can’t say n—“

This post was originally published on Indiecator.

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