Uncanny Valley

Hello, everyone! I've got an interesting subject today! Well, knowing me, you probably understand by now that the mind has always been one of my favorite topics. Let's get into a little bit of weirdness tonight, shall we? This evening the topic is: "Uncanny Valley". I'm not going to bore you with technical details (though some of them are really interesting, I must say!).

What is uncanny valley? It's that feeling of "almost right", of something that appears close to reality, but it's not really there, but we feel like it should be. With the whole AI thing, especially the image generation, the topic has really sky-rocketed lately, and for good reason. Some of you may know those not-so-old videos of Will Smith eating pasta, a horror in themselves, really! Those didn't really give us the feeling, as they were far from reality. But nowadays, seeing a photo with a man that has arms that seem just a bit too long, or a finger bent just slightly too much for a human, or a face that has too-wide-a-smile, these things really give us that sensation of unease when we see them. Exactly for the reason just mentioned: close, but not quite.

This doesn't have to be strictly a thing related with AI, it isn't really. It just surfaced more due to the sheer amount of examples that are now available. Uncanny valley is something deeper, ingrained into our brains. It's not that clear whether the mechanism was useful to detect diseased individuals, predators or some other danger, but it's deeply related to our pattern recognition. It doesn't trigger on doodles, it doesn't trigger at abstract art, only on things that "pretend" to be real, but don't quite make it, and a perfect copy doesn't trigger this. This is why it's called a "valley", it's specifically that narrow point where it's "not right", before and after which it's fine.

This is why the sensation itself is so popular in horror, it's very atmospheric, it bypasses logic, but it triggers our subconscious. Have you ever had the feeling, when looking in the mirror, that the person looking back doesn't quite seem like yourself?