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

AI-powered gadgets and services, such as virtual assistants and IoT items, continuously gather individual details, raising concerns about intrusive data gathering and access to by 3rd parties. The loss of personal privacy is further worsened by AI's ability to procedure and combine huge amounts of data, possibly leading to a surveillance society where specific activities are continuously monitored and analyzed without adequate safeguards or transparency.

Sensitive user information collected might include online activity records, geolocation information, video, or audio. [204] For example, in order to build speech recognition algorithms, Amazon has taped countless private conversations and permitted temporary workers to listen to and transcribe a few of them. [205] Opinions about this widespread security variety from those who see it as a necessary evil to those for whom it is plainly dishonest and an infraction of the right to privacy. [206]
AI developers argue that this is the only way to provide valuable applications and have established a number of methods that try to maintain personal privacy while still obtaining the data, such as information aggregation, de-identification and differential privacy. [207] Since 2016, some personal privacy experts, such as Cynthia Dwork, have started to see privacy in terms of fairness. Brian Christian wrote that experts have pivoted "from the concern of 'what they know' to the concern 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