Artificial intelligence algorithms require large quantities of information. The techniques utilized to obtain this information 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 personal privacy is further intensified by AI's capability to process and integrate large quantities of information, possibly causing a surveillance society where individual activities are constantly monitored and evaluated without appropriate safeguards or openness.

Sensitive user information collected might consist of online activity records, geolocation data, video, or audio. [204] For instance, in order to build speech recognition algorithms, Amazon has taped millions of private discussions and permitted momentary employees 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 dishonest and a violation of the right to personal privacy. [206]
AI designers argue that this is the only way to deliver important applications and have developed several techniques that attempt to maintain privacy while still obtaining the data, such as information aggregation, de-identification and differential personal privacy. [207] Since 2016, some privacy professionals, such as Cynthia Dwork, have actually begun to view privacy in terms of fairness. Brian Christian wrote that specialists have actually pivoted "from the question of 'what they know' to the concern of 'what they're doing with it'." [208]
Generative AI is often trained on unlicensed copyrighted works, consisting of in domains such as images or computer code