Watch
Synthetic personas 0:55
A 55-second explainer of Synthetic personas, narrated over the same demo you can try yourself.
Try the interactive Synthetic personas demo
What this video covers
Synthetic personas are user personas generated by AI from a prompt rather than built from research. Ask a model for "three personas for a banking app" and you get instant, polished, plausible-looking profiles. The trouble is they're assembled from training-data averages and stereotypes, not from real people - so they look like research output while being, in effect, confident fiction.
Side by side, the AI persona looks just as professional - a name, a photo, neat goals and frustrations. But read closely: it's generic, a little stereotyped, and grounded in nothing. The research-based one is specific, slightly surprising, and traceable to real quotes. Same template; one is evidence, the other is a plausible-sounding average dressed up as a user.