The Uncanny Valley

We humans have a tendency to see human characteristics in all sorts of things.

Anthropomorphism, as it’s called by people who prefer six syllable words, is everywhere. We name our hurricanes. Nation-states refer to other nation-states as she/her. Our planet is often called “Mother Earth.”

We even see faces where there aren’t any.

And, while we’re incredibly eager to make so many things that aren’t human seem human to us, there is apparently a limit to how far this can go.

People refer to this limit as “the uncanny valley”, after Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori coined the term in 1970. Mori noticed that as robots became more and more human-like, people's emotional response to them became more positive… but only to a point.

When the robots got too close to being human, but not quite there, people started to feel uncomfortable, disgusted, and repulsed.

What happened?

Finding faces that aren’t there might actually be a part of the same evolutionary phenomenon as the uncanny valley.

While it’s in our best interest to find a familiar face, human survival also depends on being very cautious with things we don’t recognize or fully understand. Potential threats loom large, and it’s in our best interest to be skeptical at first. After all, one of the main threats to humans has always been other humans!

A robot’s face, then, can trigger this deep-rooted response instantly. So can a body, as it turns out:

A second reason these images disturb us so much might be a little simpler: we expect to see an actual human being, but we see… something else. Expecting something and getting something else causes all kinds of cognitive disturbances for us.

Hollywood filmmakers have dealt with “the valley” for decades now, and they have a few interesting approaches. One approach is simply leveraging the phenomenon to enhance a narrative, like with Ex-Machina or Westworld. Embracing the phenomenon has produced some incredible movies and shows in recent years.

Another approach is to make the characters more silly, essentially taking them just barely outside of the valley. Toy Story did an excellent job of this almost 30 years ago, and that formula has been repeated by Pixar and Pixar clones ever since.

Toy Story also uses another clever trick to get us like the not-human lead characters: it gives us something even creepier to view as our real enemy:

I fully expect for CGI and generative AGI to come up with some phenomenally realistic films that leverage the uncanny valley. I suspect they’ll solve the issue in one of the three ways we’ve looked at here: by embracing the creep factor, by making them goofier, or by creating an even worse enemy so we can bond with our robot allies.

Will our view change as we become more and more comfortable with human-like generated images? I kind of doubt it. I think the geography of the uncanny valley might change a little—maybe it’ll narrow some, but it’ll always be there.

Now it’s your turn. What are some of your favorite examples of the uncanny valley?