Artificial intelligence algorithms need big quantities of data. The strategies used to obtain this information have raised concerns about privacy, surveillance and copyright.

AI-powered devices and services, such as virtual assistants and IoT products, constantly gather individual details, raising concerns about invasive data gathering and unauthorized gain access to by 3rd parties. The loss of personal privacy is additional exacerbated by AI's capability to process and combine large amounts of data, potentially resulting in a monitoring society where individual activities are continuously kept track of and analyzed without adequate safeguards or openness.

Sensitive user data gathered may include online activity records, geolocation information, video, or audio. [204] For instance, in order to construct speech recognition algorithms, Amazon has tape-recorded millions of private conversations and allowed momentary workers to listen to and transcribe some of them. [205] Opinions about this prevalent surveillance variety from those who see it as an essential evil to those for whom it is plainly dishonest and an offense of the right to privacy. [206]
AI developers argue that this is the only method to deliver important applications and have actually developed numerous techniques that try to maintain privacy while still obtaining the information, such as information aggregation, de-identification and differential privacy. [207] Since 2016, some privacy specialists, such as Cynthia Dwork, have begun to see personal privacy in terms of fairness. Brian Christian composed that experts have pivoted "from the concern of 'what they know' to the concern of 'what they're making with it'." [208]
Generative AI is often trained on unlicensed copyrighted works, including in domains such as images or computer code