One billion photos were used to train Meta's latest photo-recognition algorithm, a powerful demonstration of the current appetite for data. For those companies without access to platforms like Instagram, there is another answer: synthetic data. Synthetic data is artificially created by a computer, rather than collected from the real world. These computer-generated images can be automatically annotated by the machine that creates them. Annotation is an important part of AI training and is a process where important points in a photo, such as people or objects, are labelled to help the machine learning models understand what the image depicts.