Artificial intelligence algorithms need large amounts of information. The techniques used to obtain this data have raised concerns about personal privacy, security and copyright.

AI-powered gadgets and services, such as virtual assistants and IoT products, continuously gather individual details, raising issues about intrusive data event and unauthorized gain access to by third parties. The loss of personal privacy is further exacerbated by AI's capability to process and integrate large quantities of data, potentially causing a surveillance society where individual activities are continuously kept track of and analyzed without adequate safeguards or openness.

Sensitive user information collected may include online activity records, geolocation information, video, or audio. [204] For instance, in order to construct speech recognition algorithms, Amazon has recorded millions of private conversations and enabled momentary employees to listen to and transcribe a few 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 personal privacy. [206]
AI designers argue that this is the only way to provide valuable applications and have developed numerous techniques that attempt to maintain personal privacy while still obtaining the data, such as information aggregation, de-identification and differential personal privacy. [207] Since 2016, some personal privacy specialists, such as Cynthia Dwork, have begun to view privacy in regards to fairness. Brian Christian wrote that professionals have rotated "from the question of 'what they know' to the question of 'what they're finishing with it'." [208]
Generative AI is typically trained on unlicensed copyrighted works, including in domains such as images or computer code