The synthetic data that will help build AI and the metaverse

Synthetic data — the generation of artificial images to train AI and computer vision — will be key to building out a future metaverse.

Why it matters: AI has long been trained on images — including human faces — captured from the real world, but doing so can create serious privacy concerns.

• Using synthetic data instead can help sidestep that issue, though it brings new worries about accuracy and authenticity.

Driving the news: Facebook announced on Tuesday that it plans to shut down its decade-old facial recognition system and delete the facial scans of more than a billion users, out of what it said were privacy concerns.

Between the lines: Increasingly, privacy concerns will lead companies to move from capturing real faces and other images to train AI as they transition to using synthetically generated data.

• Tel Aviv-based synthetic data company Datagen does high-quality level digital scans and motion capture of real people and objects and then uses AI to generate realistic but not real versions.
• Gartner predicted recently that by 2024, 60% of the data used for the development of AI and analytics projects will be synthetically generated.

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