Artificial intelligence algorithms require large amounts of data. The strategies utilized to obtain this data have raised issues about privacy, surveillance and copyright.

AI-powered devices and services, such as virtual assistants and IoT items, continuously collect personal details, raising issues about intrusive data gathering and unauthorized gain access to by third parties. The loss of personal privacy is additional worsened by AI's ability to procedure and integrate vast quantities of information, possibly causing a surveillance society where specific activities are continuously kept track of and examined without appropriate safeguards or transparency.

Sensitive user data gathered might consist of online activity records, geolocation information, video, or audio. [204] For example, in order to build speech acknowledgment algorithms, Amazon has taped millions of private conversations and allowed short-lived workers to listen to and transcribe a few of them. [205] Opinions about this prevalent surveillance variety from those who see it as an essential evil to those for whom it is plainly dishonest and an offense of the right to personal privacy. [206]
AI designers argue that this is the only way to deliver valuable applications and have developed several techniques that attempt to maintain privacy while still obtaining the information, such as data aggregation, de-identification and differential privacy. [207] Since 2016, some personal privacy specialists, such as Cynthia Dwork, have actually begun to see privacy in regards to fairness. Brian Christian composed that experts have pivoted "from the concern of 'what they know' to the question of 'what they're doing with it'." [208]
Generative AI is frequently trained on unlicensed copyrighted works, including in domains such as images or computer code