2025

This essay is the first in Integreat Insights: Understanding AI Beyond the Hype, a series from researchers at Integreat. The series aims to separate fact from fiction in today’s fast-changing AI landscape and to share how Integreat’s research is making machine learning more sustainable, accurate, trustworthy, and ethical.

Data is everywhere, shaping our health, our news feeds, and the products we buy. But real data comes with real problems: it is expensive to collect, often biased, and sometimes too private to share. Synthetic data, or “fake” data can look and behave like real data. It might sound strange, but in many cases fake data can actually make science and innovation more fair, efficient, and secure.