The Underground Trade in « Ghost » AI Training Data

The Underground Trade in « Ghost » AI Training Data
Behind the race to build powerful AI models lies a dirty secret: a thriving black market for « ghost data. » This is proprietary, personal, or copyrighted information—private chat logs, defunct social media archives, pirated book libraries, internal corporate memos—scrubbed of identifiers and sold clandestinely to train AI systems. With legitimate, high-quality data becoming scarce and expensive, startups and even some large players are turning to these shadowy brokers. The data is often stolen or acquired under false pretenses, violating copyright and privacy on an industrial scale. This grey market undermines the ethics of the AI boom, entrenches bias (as the data reflects stolen or skewed sources), and creates « zombie » models trained on information that legally doesn’t exist.