4S 2025 Panel: Synthetic Data – Valuations, Qualities, and Metrics

Francis Lee and Katherine Harrison organized an open panel at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) in Seattle. The panel investigated the emerging socio-technical assemblages of synthetic data and their implications for knowledge production, material infrastructure, and lived experience.

The panel asked what counts as “good” and “real” in AI-generated data, and whether synthetic data delivers on its promises around data scarcity, privacy, and bias. Papers examined how synthetic data practices reconfigure social relations, epistemic cultures, and imaginaries of a “ground truth.”