Artificial intelligence algorithms need large amounts of information. The techniques utilized to obtain this information have raised concerns about personal privacy, surveillance and copyright.

AI-powered devices and services, such as virtual assistants and IoT products, continuously collect personal details, raising issues about intrusive information gathering and unauthorized gain access to by third parties. The loss of personal privacy is additional intensified by AI's ability to process and integrate large amounts of data, potentially leading to a surveillance society where specific activities are constantly kept an eye on and evaluated without sufficient safeguards or openness.

Sensitive user information gathered may consist of online activity records, geolocation information, video, or audio. [204] For example, in order to construct speech recognition algorithms, Amazon has actually tape-recorded countless private conversations and allowed temporary workers to listen to and transcribe some of them. [205] Opinions about this extensive surveillance variety from those who see it as a necessary evil to those for whom it is plainly unethical and an offense of the right to privacy. [206]
AI developers argue that this is the only way to provide important applications and have developed a number of strategies that try to maintain privacy while still obtaining the information, such as information aggregation, de-identification and differential privacy. [207] Since 2016, some privacy professionals, such as Cynthia Dwork, have actually begun to see personal privacy in regards to fairness. Brian Christian composed that experts have actually rotated "from the question of 'what they know' to the concern of 'what they're doing with it'." [208]
Generative AI is frequently trained on unlicensed copyrighted works, including in domains such as images or computer code