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

AI-powered devices and services, such as virtual assistants and IoT products, continuously collect personal details, raising concerns about invasive data gathering and unapproved gain access to by third celebrations. The loss of personal privacy is further intensified by AI's capability to procedure and combine huge amounts of data, potentially leading to a surveillance society where individual activities are continuously kept an eye on and evaluated without appropriate safeguards or openness.

Sensitive user information gathered may consist of online activity records, geolocation information, video, or audio. [204] For instance, in order to develop speech recognition algorithms, Amazon has actually taped countless private discussions and allowed short-term employees to listen to and transcribe some of them. [205] Opinions about this prevalent surveillance range 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 designers argue that this is the only method to provide important applications and have established a number of techniques that attempt to maintain privacy while still obtaining the data, such as information aggregation, de-identification and differential privacy. [207] Since 2016, some personal privacy professionals, such as Cynthia Dwork, have actually begun to view privacy in regards to fairness. Brian Christian composed that experts have rotated "from the concern of 'what they understand' to the concern of 'what they're making with it'." [208]
Generative AI is often trained on unlicensed copyrighted works, including in domains such as images or computer system code