Artificial intelligence algorithms require large quantities of data. The methods used to obtain this data have raised concerns about personal privacy, monitoring and copyright.

AI-powered gadgets and services, such as virtual assistants and IoT items, constantly gather personal details, raising concerns about intrusive information gathering and unauthorized gain access to by 3rd parties. The loss of privacy is additional exacerbated by AI's capability to procedure and integrate huge quantities of information, possibly leading to a surveillance society where specific activities are continuously kept an eye on and analyzed without appropriate safeguards or transparency.

Sensitive user data collected may include online activity records, geolocation information, video, or audio. [204] For instance, in order to build speech acknowledgment algorithms, Amazon has taped millions of private conversations and permitted short-lived 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 developers argue that this is the only method to provide important applications and have actually established a number of strategies that attempt to maintain personal privacy while still obtaining the data, such as information aggregation, de-identification and differential privacy. [207] Since 2016, some privacy experts, such as Cynthia Dwork, have actually started to view personal privacy in terms of fairness. Brian Christian wrote that professionals have rotated "from the question of 'what they know' to the concern of 'what they're doing with it'." [208]
Generative AI is frequently trained on unlicensed copyrighted works, consisting of in domains such as images or computer system code