Definition
Synthetic human
A fully generated person with no real human underneath. Distinct from a licensed digital twin, and treated differently in the new SAG-AFTRA language.
From the episode “8.3 Billion Faces, Zero Infrastructure: The AI Likeness Market Nobody Is Serving”Hear it on the podcast1 episode
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Related terms in AI Fundamentals
Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT)The standard technique for specializing a pretrained large language model on a specific task or domain: show the model labeled examples of correct input-output pairs, and train it to reproduce that behavior. SFT requires curated training data, and the quality of that data is the primary bottleneck - not the compute or the base model. Ben Turtle built LightningRod to eliminate this bottleneck for teams that lack the scale, budget, or time to pay human labeling companies like Scale AI or Labelbox to create SFT-ready datasets.Supervised learningTraining a model on labeled examples, inputs paired with the correct answers, so it learns to predict the answer for new inputs.SycophancyAn AI's tendency to flatter or agree with users regardless of accuracy.Synthetic dataData generated by algorithms or simulations instead of collected from the real world, often used to train or test models.Synthetic RelationshipA one-to-one connection between a human user and an AI entity designed to feel lifelike.Temporal Self-SupervisionA machine learning approach that uses the natural time structure of data as the training signal, without requiring human-generated labels. Instead of asking humans to annotate examples, the system uses 'what actually happened next' as the ground truth for each prediction attempt. LightningRod's chronological prediction method is a form of temporal self-supervision applied to domain corpora: any dataset with timestamps - news archives, SEC filings, clinical records, internal communications - becomes a self-labeling training environment. This mirrors how humans learn: we predict what happens next, observe whether we were right, and update our world model accordingly.TensorA container of numbers arranged in multiple dimensions. It is the basic data structure AI models compute with.Text-to-speech (TTS)Technology that converts written text into spoken audio.