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

AI-powered gadgets and services, such as virtual assistants and IoT items, continually gather personal details, raising issues about invasive information gathering and unauthorized gain access to by 3rd parties. The loss of personal privacy is further intensified by AI's capability to process and combine vast quantities of information, potentially leading to a surveillance society where private activities are constantly kept track of and evaluated without appropriate safeguards or transparency.

Sensitive user information gathered may include online activity records, geolocation data, video, or audio. [204] For example, in order to construct speech recognition algorithms, Amazon has tape-recorded countless private conversations and allowed short-term workers to listen to and transcribe some of them. [205] Opinions about this extensive security range from those who see it as a required evil to those for whom it is plainly unethical and an offense of the right to privacy. [206]
AI developers argue that this is the only way to provide important applications and have developed several techniques that try to maintain personal privacy while still obtaining the information, such as data aggregation, de-identification and differential personal privacy. [207] Since 2016, some personal privacy experts, such as Cynthia Dwork, have actually started to view privacy in regards to fairness. Brian Christian wrote that experts have rotated "from the question of 'what they know' to the question of 'what they're doing with it'." [208]
Generative AI is typically trained on unlicensed copyrighted works, including in domains such as images or computer system code