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Twitch is Mining Peoples' Streams to Train Amazon's AI

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Twitch is Mining Peoples' Streams to Train Amazon's AI

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

"If you opt-out and decide to not allow your channel content to train Generative AI content models, your streams, VODs, clips, stream chats, and pictures and text on your channel will not be used in future training of a model developed by Amazon whose purpose is to generate or synthesize text, audio, images, or video," Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, says in its new FAQ section about generative AI.

"Opting-out of training generative AI content models does not opt you out of all AI or machine learning uses at Twitch," Twitch's support page says. "For example, Twitch will still run AutoMod, which helps keep our community safe, but does not retain your data and use it to produce content. Twitch may also still use your data to run AI-supported features, like captions, which automatically generate captions for your Clips but does not retain your stream or your clips to train a model that can generate new content." 

Twitch is positioning this setting as a favor to users. "We've added a setting that lets you opt out of having your channel content used to train generative AI content models across Amazon," the platform posted on X Wednesday. In practice, Twitch makes this choice for users unless they know about the new setting and proactively turn it off. This was the case on my own Twitch account, and users on social media are reporting the same.

Twitch executives have been talking about using streamers' content to train AI for years. In 2024, Twitch Chief Monetization Officer Mike Minton said Twitch has a “role to play” in training Amazon's generative AI models, adding that Twitch content was already being used “in a prototyping, not in any kind of production scale, capacity.”

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Twitch's publicly available press email repeatedly bounced.

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InShaneee
26 minutes ago
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Coyote Vs. Acme takes its silliness all the way to the top

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If a real court case faced as many delays and as much public scrutiny as Coyote Vs. Acme, any rational judge would call for a mistrial and scrap the whole thing. Thankfully, the world of film is a little more forgiving, even when a Looney Tunes comedy has been kicked around as much as this one. Famously completed, then shelved by Warner Bros. for a tax break, then sold to another company in order to finally see the light of day, Coyote Vs. Acme is fittingly about corporate malpractice, filled with whistleblowers, fine print, and weaselly suits. It’s a Looney Dark Waters, both winningly silly and slyly intelligent about what winning really means, all wrapped into a referential live-action Tune world not unlike our own.

Speedrunning through Wile E. Coyote’s endless, ill-fated, Acme-financing attempts to catch the Road Runner—culminating in the poor animal being bombed by the U.S. military like he was some kind of fisherman—Coyote Vs. Acme quickly builds its case of corporate malfeasance. After hitting all the classic schemes, including “flashback” footage from the duo’s Chuck Jones heyday (which is a little unflattering considering the way the animation looks here), Wile finally hits his limit. Retreating back to his cave, he catches a commercial for ambulance-chaser Kevin Avery (Will Forte, maybe the best he’s been since Nebraska), the pathetic personal injury attorney specializing in cartoon clients.

It’s like they were built in a lab for each other, specifically a lab staffed by far more competent employees than those found at Acme. Even Kevin’s mop of hair and scraggly beard match Wile’s mangy desperation. He and his ragtag legal team—dead-eyed partners Jones (Martha Kelly) and Maltese (Tone Bell), and his not-yet-dead-eyed assistant/niece Paige (Lana Condor)—cobble crappy careers together pursuing three-figure sums for their variously pancaked, blown-up, and mummy-bandaged clientele.

They’re all a perfect match, and imperfectly matched against the personification of Big Money: Acme’s hotshot legal counsel Buddy Crane (John Cena), all muscle and tailoring and country club charm, like how The Rock imagines himself in real life. Pitted against each other in and outside the courtroom, Cena and Forte are hilariously straight-faced and dedicated to the bit—a moment between Cena and Tweety features some all-timer pronunciation—while the Tunes thankfully just get to be themselves.

This is good, because the Tunes (mostly voiced by Eric Bauza, who even provides the film with its own Deep Throat) certainly don’t look their best. Coyote Vs. Acme blends live-action, 2D animation, and oddly bulging semi-3D animation. But though it’s nowhere near the Roger Rabbit ideal for this kind of thing—especially in the character models, which catch the light in more uncanny ways the more conspicuously they’re supposed to move in three dimensions—it all eventually arrives at the same level of enjoyable chaos. 

The VFX is much better when put towards the film’s violently silly slapstick, and it’s here that director Dave Green makes animated cause convincingly meet live-action effect. It’s so enjoyably explosive, painful, and over-the-top that it makes this universe’s dismissive view of cartoon injuries—they’ll recover from explosions and blunt force trauma just by coughing off the resulting ash or pressing down the lump that rises from their skulls—all the more impactful. That last wrinkle is just one savvy little observation from the script, its premise adapted from a New Yorker article by Samy Burch (May December, Late Fame). Burch packs in the gags, most of which work, and classic references, starting from the film’s Albuquerque locale (and the copious bolo ties that entails) and its carrot festival, to a news report on a particularly fast Mexican mouse, to the Looney version of Peter Lorre.

Much of this plays to the cartoon-fluent crowd while remaining as accessible to first-timers as Ketchup Entertainment’s Looney Tunes release from last year. But speaking to its effectiveness as a legal comedy, Coyote Vs. Acme also smuggles in insights about struggle and failure in the face of overwhelming odds and forces you can barely comprehend, and about fighting the long fight in a system stacked against you. Defining Wile as a Sisyphean figure has rarely felt so hopeful. That this message comes from a very funny film whose own journey to the screen mimics its try-and-fail-and-try-and-explode protagonist, not to mention his fight against a massive uncaring corporation, is justice.

Director: Dave Green
Writer: Samy Burch
Starring: Will Forte, Lana Condor, Tone Bell, Luis Guzmán, Martha Kelly, P.J. Byrne, and John Cena. Eric Bauza, Kenneth Choi, Candi Milo, Jim Cummings
Release Date: August 28, 2026



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InShaneee
34 minutes ago
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France Bans Unsolicited Telemarking Calls

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Starting today, unsolicited telemarking calls are banned in France unless consumers explicitly consent to them. Companies that violate the law can face fines of up to 375,000 euros per call, though existing customers can still be contacted with related offers. Le Monde reports: The government says the law is a response to years of consumer complaints. Authorities estimate that about three-quarters of people in France receive at least one unsolicited sales call every week, and many receive more. In 2024, 11 consumer organizations issued a joint call for a ban, denouncing "relentless harassment of consumers through countless unwanted telemarketing calls to both landlines and mobile phones -- an intrusion that has become a regular part of their daily lives." Now, "businesses are prohibited from contacting consumers without their prior consent," said Alice Vilcot, chief of staff at the Directorate-General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Prevention of Fraud. "That consent can be withdrawn at any time." [...] Previously in France, people who wanted to avoid marketing calls had to register their number with a government-run service, but consumer groups said some call centers ignored the list. Vilcot noted that an Ireland-based company was fined 6 million euros ($6.9 million) last year for violating France's previous telemarketing rules by calling people on the no-call list.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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InShaneee
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England Set To Eliminate Hepatitis C

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: England is on track to become one of the first countries in the world to eliminate hepatitis C, a dangerous virus that attacks the liver, figures show. The target of treating 80% of all known cases has already been met, and deaths from the virus have fallen by 36% in the last decade, just short of what is needed by 2030. Taking antiviral tablets for 8 to 12 weeks can cure more than 95% of cases. Initiatives including A&E blood tests, GP registration testing and free at-home tests have helped to find people who were previously undiagnosed, says NHS England. NHS England says that since 2015, more than 100,000 people have been diagnosed and treated for hepatitis C, meaning the country is already meeting that target. Another goal -- a 65% reduction in hepatitis C-related mortality compared with 2015 levels -- has yet to be met, but might be before the 2030 target date. Around 50,200 adults are living with hepatitis C, figures for England in 2024 suggest. Estimates indicate 84.6% of those living with hepatitis C have been diagnosed -- just short of the 90% target. The Hepatitis C Trust says England is "on the cusp" of one of the most significant public health achievements in our country's history.

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InShaneee
1 day ago
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A year in, thousands of armed troops have quietly become a fixture of D.C. life

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The Washington Monument is seen in the distance as members of the National Guard stand atop the steps at the Lincoln Memorial at sunrise on the National Mall in Washington, DC, on July 23, 2026.

The deployment is expected to cost in the billions after it was quietly extended until Inauguration Day of 2029.

(Image credit: Kent Nishimura)

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InShaneee
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R.I.P. Reggie Bannister, Phantasm star

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Reggie Bannister has died. Bannister was best known as “Reggie,” the heroic ice cream man, from the Phantasm series, an iconic horror hero who survived the Tall Man across five movies. Dubbed the “hardest working man in horror” by his Phantasm maestro Don Coscarelli, Bannister died on August 9 at his California cabin, his wife, Gigi, confirmed to TMZ. No cause of death was immediately reported, but Bannister suffered from Lewy body dementia and Parkinson’s disease and entered hospice care last February. He was 80. 

“In the Phantasm series, only Reggie could turn a simple role as an ice cream vendor sidekick into an unlikely action hero for the ages,” Coscarelli wrote on Facebook. “He channeled himself into that role. All the fans who met him at the horror conventions could attest that in person, Reg was cool, funny, loyal, and steadfast. Reggie the character was Reggie the friend. In real life, he embodied all the qualities of his character in Phantasm, and no one questioned that Reg was that guy, the one willing to lay his body down on the fires of hell for his friends.”

Born September 29, 1945, in Long Beach, California, Bannister attended Long Beach City College and found early success as a folk musician. Performing with the Greenwood County Singers, he scored a hit with “The New Frankie And Johnny Song,” co-written by Shel Silverstein, and performed on The Ed Sullivan Show. Soon after, he was drafted into the military and shipped to Vietnam. As a head radio operator for an automatic weapons specialty group, he lost some of his hearing and was exposed to Agent Orange. “The main thing I didn’t like being a part of was being the killing machine, but then as citizens, when this country goes to war we’re all part of the killing machine, aren’t we?” Bannister said in 2017. “We don’t really have a say in what’s going on.” 

After returning from war, Bannister used the G.I. Bill to study acting, eventually meeting Coscarelli in a Long Beach dive bar to discuss the director’s first movie, 1975’s Jim, The World’s Greatest. It began a lifelong collaboration between Coscarelli and Bannister that continued into the Phantasm franchise in 1979. The film, with its inventive effects and off-beat sense of humor, was an immediate cult hit, thanks in large part to Bannister’s performance. Coscarelli wrote the role of Reggie for Bannister, based it on his personality, and gifted the series an honorable and loyal everyman who challenged typical notions of the action hero. The guitar-playing and endlessly affable Bannister took the orb and ran with it, becoming an essential part of the series and starring in all five installments. The Phantasm movies made Bannister a regular in independent horror movies. Throughout his career, Bannister also starred in Wishmaster, Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation, and Bubba Ho-Tep.

Bannister is survived by his wife, Gigi, and daughter Ellen.



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