Synthetic data
Synthetic data is artificial data generated by a program or an AI model to look like real data. It is used to train or test systems when real data is scarce, private or expensive.
In one line, for a 12-year-old
Synthetic data is pretend data made by a computer so an AI can practise without using real people's information.
An example
A bank creates synthetic customer records to test a fraud model without exposing real accounts.
Why it matters to people
It can protect privacy, but poorly made synthetic data can still reveal real people or carry over the biases of the original. And models trained too much on AI output can degrade over time.