AI-generated videos are flooding the internet, thanks in large part to OpenAI's Sora 2, and people are now questioning whether every video they see is fake. Twitch, the Amazon-owned livestreaming platform, revealed some AI features last week that should even those odds, at least somewhat.
At TwitchCon 2025 in San Diego, the platform said AI would be coming to the platform in much more subtle ways. Twitch, which allows people to livestream themselves playing video games, doing makeup or walking the streets of Tokyo, is leaning into the analytical side of AI.
A feature called Auto Clip will have AI help creators quickly edit parts of a multi-hour stream to help preserve and spread the best moments to short-form social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Apart from using AI to quickly make clips, Twitch will also integrate with Meta's AI Ray-Bans, letting people stream directly from their glasses.
"One of the biggest things we're moving quickly on is content understanding," said Mike Minton, chief product officer at Twitch. "What is the streamer saying? What is happening in the stream? What's going on with chat? Our ability now to comprehend and, as a consequence, unlocks so many things that relates to things that directly help streamers."
Minton said only one in four streamers creates clips after a stream. Many top streamers have editors on staff to clip the best parts of their stream to spread across social media.
Hasan "HasanAbi" Piker, among other streamers, allows his community to clip streams and give them permission to reap the ad revenue. For smaller streamers, however, scrubbing through an eight-hour stream to find those perfect moments can be difficult.
It solves the problem of creating short-form content, letting streamers focus on the important work of keeping audiences connected and introducing themselves to new people, said Minton.
Twitch is the second-largest live streaming platform in the world, just after YouTube, according to Stream Charts. Purchased by Amazon for $970 million in 2014, Twitch currently boasts 240 million active monthly users and 7.3 million streamers, according to Demandsage. Many top streamers have become multi-millionaires from ad revenue alone, per leaked reports. Despite the impressive numbers, Twitch remains unprofitable, according to a 2024 Wall Street Journal report. There's fear that it's becoming a "zombie brand" -- an acquisition that'll become sidelined because it hasn't met expectations -- according to current and former employees who spoke to the Journal. While Amazon hasn't given a breakdown of Twitch's finances, recent statements and monetization pushes suggest more needs to be done.
As a free platform, Twitch largely relies on ads and brand deals to make its revenue. In 2022, Twitch attempted to end its 70/30 ad split for top streamers, hoping to make 50/50 the standard. It ultimately rescinded the decision. The site has recently been upping the number of ads appearing on streams and giving creators better insight into how ads can lead to larger payouts. These practices have irked some fans. Twitch has also begun cracking down on viewbots -- a program designed to artificially inflate viewer counts -- so both streamers and advertisers have a better sense of how many people are actually watching. Given these headwinds, Twitch laid off 500 employees in early 2024, about 35% of its workforce.
"This is an excellent move for opening up the funnel," said Laura Martin, senior entertainment and internet analyst at Needham & Company. "If these automations can create clips that are then able to be put onto TikTok, or Reels or YouTube Shorts, and fuel awareness by a new set of people or additional people."
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Because Twitch is a longform platform, being able to distribute easily on short-form feeds can drive new and existing fans, according to Martin.
Twitch is also an incredibly difficult platform to find success. Less than 1% of streamers make the equivalent of minimum wage or more on the platform, per a 2021 leak. This excludes outside monetization done via brand deals. With Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, Fortnite and every other online platform vying for attention, finding an audience willing to spend hours watching a streamer and drop their credit card down for added subscription benefits is asking a lot. It's especially true when there's a near limitless amount of content ready for consumption online, often for free. At least with AI, it can help streamers maximize their brand activations.
"You can imagine in the context of influencer marketing and making sure that when streamers are doing activations that we can validate that what they were supposed to do was being done, helps us bring more sponsorships to streamers," said Minton.
The actual rollout and fan reaction to AI features remains to be determined, however. The Twitch community is vocal, often expressing their disagreements loudly and forcing the company to pivot.
"For a couple of years now, Twitch has been building products for a type of creator it wants on the platform, rather than the type of creator that the platform already has," said Zach Bussey, an industry analyst and owner of the TOS.gg newsletter, which covers the streaming and creative spaces.
Bussey noted that products like Hype Chats, Guest Star and Stories failed to take off, and he worries that Auto Clip won't work as intended. "More importantly, I suspect it will further deepen the rift among its creative community," he said.
Already, streamer and game developer Jason "Thor" Hall, who runs the channel Pirate Software, expressed his dislike of AI-clipping tools on X, saying he believes they don't do as good a job as currently free tools online. Minton actually pushed back in a reply, saying he too dislikes AI slop, but that these tools will help the 75% of streamers not clipping currently.
While AI tools are handy, they are expensive to run. Being able to analyze and clip content or auto-caption streams for millions of streamers won't come cheap.
"Well, at our scale, it certainly is," said Minton. "There's a lot of things that the business upside for everybody offsets the cost."
Minton believes that Twitch will figure out the cost of AI over time. He also believes that as many streamers as possible should have access to these tools, but that Twitch will need to balance broad availability.
Twitch sees AI as an agentic layer to help streamers, most of whom don't have teams of people behind them setting up and monitoring things. Minton wants AI to be used to automate safety on the platform, instead of having to rely on user reports. In chat, AI could be used to answer basic questions for new viewers so that streamers don't have to answer the same questions over and over again as new people enter their community. He also sees AI as a way to help streamers expand their creative options, for example, using the technology to create a dungeon master for a Dungeons & Dragons-type experience.
As AI technology improves, Minton sees auto-dubbing as a way to expand fanbases. For example, a streamer in Spain could use AI auto-dubbing to stream in English, with it sounding completely natural.
As exciting as the idea of AI tools can be, it all comes down to execution. If AI ends up causing more headaches, it won't have the desired effect.
"Knowing this community, as the feature releases, more creators will speak out, creating an unwinnable PR battle unless the feature is flawless in execution," said Bussey. "That's where my own doubt creeps in, because history is not on their side in getting it right out of the gate."
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