Synthetic Media

What is synthetic media?

Synthetic media is a catch-all term to describe video, image, text, or voice that has been fully or partially generated using artificial intelligence algorithms.

‍

Synthetic media can be separated into 7 types:

• Synthetic video
• Synthetic images
• Synthetic voice
• AI-generated text
• AI influencers
• Mixed reality
• Face swap

How does synthetic media work?

Synthetic media is created by artificial intelligence algorithms. Machine learning models recognise and analyse patterns of input data and learn to perform tasks based on these data, without human intervention.

The difference between synthetic and non-synthetic media

Synthetic media are media that are partially or fully generated by computers. Non-synthetic media can be any other media, i.e., media that is produced by human input.

Take a newspaper article, for instance. Written entirely by a human, it clearly falls under non-synthetic media.

Now think of a photo where an Instagram filter is used to add bunny ears to a real human face. This is partially generated by AI (the pic being modified by algorithms), and we can thus say it’s “synthetic.”

‍