Artificial intelligence algorithms require big quantities of information. The techniques utilized to obtain this data have raised concerns about privacy, surveillance and copyright.

AI-powered devices and services, such as virtual assistants and IoT products, continually collect personal details, raising concerns about intrusive information gathering and unauthorized gain access to by 3rd parties. The loss of personal privacy is more worsened by AI's capability to process and integrate huge amounts of data, possibly causing a monitoring society where individual activities are constantly kept track of and examined without adequate safeguards or transparency.

Sensitive user data collected may include online activity records, geolocation information, video, or audio. [204] For example, in order to construct speech acknowledgment algorithms, Amazon has actually recorded millions of private discussions and allowed temporary employees to listen to and transcribe a few of them. [205] Opinions about this extensive surveillance range from those who see it as a required evil to those for whom it is plainly unethical and a violation of the right to privacy. [206]
AI designers argue that this is the only way to deliver important applications and have actually developed numerous techniques that attempt to maintain privacy while still obtaining the data, such as data aggregation, de-identification and differential privacy. [207] Since 2016, some privacy specialists, such as Cynthia Dwork, have actually started to view privacy in terms of fairness. Brian Christian wrote that professionals have actually pivoted "from the question of 'what they understand' 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