AI is still weighing on streamers at Twitchs biggest event of the year

SAN DIEGO — “Tone deaf.” “Bland and boring.” “stupid.”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.Just a few months ago, Twitch stoked outrage from its user base when it publicly introduced an option that would allow streamers to opt out of having their content used to train AI models owned by its parent company, Amazon.

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