Artificial intelligence algorithms need big amounts of information. The methods utilized to obtain this data have raised concerns about privacy, surveillance and copyright.

AI-powered gadgets and services, such as virtual assistants and IoT products, continuously collect personal details, raising concerns about invasive data gathering and unauthorized gain access to by third parties. The loss of privacy is more worsened by AI's ability to process and combine vast amounts of information, possibly leading to a surveillance society where individual activities are constantly monitored and evaluated without appropriate safeguards or openness.

Sensitive user data gathered may include online activity records, geolocation data, video, or audio. [204] For example, in order to build speech recognition algorithms, Amazon has recorded millions of private conversations and allowed short-term employees to listen to and transcribe some of them. [205] Opinions about this prevalent security range from those who see it as an essential evil to those for whom it is plainly dishonest and a violation of the right to personal privacy. [206]
AI designers argue that this is the only way to provide important applications and have developed a number of strategies that attempt to maintain personal privacy while still obtaining the information, such as data aggregation, de-identification and differential privacy. [207] Since 2016, some privacy specialists, such as Cynthia Dwork, have actually begun to view privacy in terms of fairness. Brian Christian wrote that specialists have pivoted "from the concern of 'what they know' to the concern of 'what they're finishing with it'." [208]
Generative AI is frequently trained on unlicensed copyrighted works, including in domains such as images or computer code