Artificial intelligence algorithms require large quantities of data. The techniques used to obtain this information have actually raised issues about privacy, surveillance and copyright.

AI-powered devices and services, such as virtual assistants and IoT products, continuously gather personal details, raising issues about intrusive information gathering and unauthorized gain access to by 3rd parties. The loss of personal privacy is further intensified by AI's ability to process and combine large quantities of information, potentially leading to a security society where individual activities are continuously kept track of and examined without adequate safeguards or transparency.

Sensitive user information gathered might include online activity records, geolocation information, video, or audio. [204] For instance, in order to build speech acknowledgment algorithms, Amazon has actually tape-recorded millions of personal conversations and allowed temporary employees to listen to and transcribe some of them. [205] Opinions about this prevalent surveillance range from those who see it as an essential evil to those for whom it is plainly dishonest and an offense of the right to privacy. [206]
AI designers argue that this is the only way to provide valuable applications and have actually developed numerous methods that attempt to maintain privacy while still obtaining the information, such as information aggregation, de-identification and differential personal privacy. [207] Since 2016, some privacy specialists, such as Cynthia Dwork, have begun to see personal privacy in terms of fairness. Brian Christian wrote that professionals have actually rotated "from the question of 'what they understand' to the concern of 'what they're making with it'." [208]
Generative AI is frequently trained on unlicensed copyrighted works, including in domains such as images or computer system code