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

AI-powered gadgets and services, such as virtual assistants and IoT items, continually gather personal details, raising issues about intrusive data gathering and unapproved gain access to by 3rd parties. The loss of personal privacy is additional exacerbated by AI's capability to procedure and combine large amounts of data, potentially leading to a surveillance society where individual activities are continuously kept track of and evaluated without adequate safeguards or transparency.

Sensitive user data collected might consist of online activity records, geolocation information, video, or audio. [204] For example, in order to construct speech recognition algorithms, Amazon has taped millions of personal discussions and permitted temporary employees to listen to and transcribe a few of them. [205] Opinions about this prevalent monitoring variety from those who see it as a necessary evil to those for whom it is plainly unethical and an infraction of the right to personal privacy. [206]
AI developers argue that this is the only way to provide important applications and have established several strategies that try to maintain privacy while still obtaining the data, such as information aggregation, de-identification and differential privacy. [207] Since 2016, some personal privacy specialists, such as Cynthia Dwork, have actually started to view personal privacy in regards to fairness. Brian Christian wrote that professionals have actually pivoted "from the concern of 'what they understand' to the question of 'what they're finishing with it'." [208]
Generative AI is typically trained on unlicensed copyrighted works, including in domains such as images or computer system code