Artificial intelligence algorithms require large amounts of data. The methods used to obtain this information have raised concerns about privacy, surveillance and copyright.

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

Sensitive user data collected might include online activity records, geolocation data, video, or audio. [204] For example, in order to develop speech recognition algorithms, Amazon has recorded millions of personal discussions and allowed short-term employees to listen to and transcribe some of them. [205] Opinions about this extensive surveillance variety from those who see it as a necessary evil to those for whom it is plainly dishonest and a violation of the right to privacy. [206]
AI developers argue that this is the only method to deliver valuable applications and have actually established a number of techniques that attempt to maintain personal privacy while still obtaining the data, such as data aggregation, de-identification and differential personal privacy. [207] Since 2016, some privacy specialists, such as Cynthia Dwork, have actually begun to view privacy in regards to fairness. Brian Christian composed that specialists have actually rotated "from the concern of 'what they understand' to the concern of 'what they're finishing with it'." [208]
Generative AI is frequently trained on unlicensed copyrighted works, consisting of in domains such as images or computer code