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

AI-powered gadgets and services, such as virtual assistants and IoT products, constantly collect individual details, raising issues about invasive information gathering and unauthorized gain access to by 3rd parties. The loss of personal privacy is additional intensified by AI's ability to process and combine vast quantities of data, potentially leading to a monitoring society where individual activities are constantly kept track of and analyzed without appropriate safeguards or transparency.

Sensitive user information collected may consist of online activity records, geolocation information, video, or audio. [204] For example, in order to build speech recognition algorithms, Amazon has recorded millions of personal discussions and enabled short-term employees to listen to and transcribe a few of them. [205] Opinions about this extensive surveillance variety from those who see it as a needed evil to those for whom it is plainly unethical and an offense of the right to personal privacy. [206]
AI developers argue that this is the only method to provide valuable applications and have developed several techniques that attempt to maintain privacy while still obtaining the information, such as data aggregation, de-identification and differential personal privacy. [207] Since 2016, some privacy specialists, such as Cynthia Dwork, have begun to view privacy in terms of fairness. Brian Christian wrote that experts have rotated "from the concern of 'what they understand' to the question 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