ELI5: What is synthetic data

Synthetic data is fake information created to look and act like real information, but it doesn't come from real people or events.

Think of it like this: Imagine you want to learn how to bake cookies, but you don't want to waste your ingredients practicing.

• Instead of using real flour, sugar, and eggs, you use play dough.
• The play dough represents synthetic data. It looks like the real ingredients (real data), and you can use it to practice your cookie-making steps without any actual cost.
• Once you're good at using the play dough, you can then use real ingredients to bake real cookies.

• Instead of showing the computer thousands of real pictures of cats (which can be hard to collect and might have privacy issues), you can create synthetic images of cats using a computer program.
• These synthetic cats aren't real, but they look like cats.
• The computer can learn to recognize cats using these synthetic images, and then it can hopefully recognize real cats in real pictures.