Synthetic Data in the Era of AI

Thomas M. Menino Convention & Exhibition Center 

Data synthesis as a strategy for broadening access to private and confidential data has seen an
exponential growth in recent years. The hype around synthetic data is mostly triggered by the rise of
modern AI and its hunger for data. In this context, the synthetic data approach also became
increasingly popular in Computer Science with various generative AI models being turned into data
synthesizers. However, the strong focus on algorithms in the Computer Science literature led to what
I call the three black boxes problem. Current discussions at least in the scientific community often do
not think about the data, ignore the purposes for which the data are generated, and typically do not
try to understand how the synthesis model affects downstream analysis tasks. In this talk, I will
discuss some of the challenges arising from this narrow focus on the algorithm.

Generative AI

Synthetic

User

Data