Do you find AI as uncanny as I do?
Not always, but many times, I can't help but to feel a shiver when confronted --mostly on the net, of course-- with images of synthesis that seem to be getting more perfect from day to day. One quite important source of uncanniness here is associated with so called morphing (which by the way is always looming over these products as a sheer possibility), but what I would rather address here is the quality these products have to mimic real beings. I had the name on the tip of my tongue--I mean how they call this funny feeling that strikes you when you interact with or simply watch or hear a figure or voice that looks like that of a human being, without being totally certain it really is such. The expression that came to my mind was "dark valley", but it didn't sound right, so, ironically enough, I asked ChatGPT for the real thing, which it turned up had been dubbed "The Uncanny Valley Phenomenon". This spooky feeling apparently had no name until a Japanese author back in the 70s referred to it as "bukimi no tani", before its English translation (whose adequacy I cannot judge) became the model for other European languages (Spanish: "el Valle Inquietante").
Great text and subject. I read about this phenomenon a while ago and it intrigued me equally as much as it did you. My feedback to you is mostly small syntactical mistakes and useful alternatives to your way of expressing yourself. Take it with a grain of salt of course and keep what you like. Kudos! :)
Your feedback is much appreciated, SK! Thank you very much!
No problem. Definitely pay attention to what @CocoPop said as a native ;)
Indeed. AI seems likely to outstrip human intelligence. The only question is "When?"
Hi, Tim. That hints at some kind of threshold I find hard to think. However, everything seems to be speeding up, not sure if it is society, tech, etc., or just my own getting old. Are the theorists of the singularity right?
Hi, @eugen_blick . I've wrote about the same topic in this post . I don't think AI makes human happy. However, I can't avoid using it in my work.
Hi @Akiko! I may have seen your post in passing, and the issue probably kept lingering in my mind. BTW, they say AI works fine (whatever you define this) now, while it's being mostly fed with normal (human-made) data, but there are hints that with an increase in the share of AI-made data to feed on (as it is inevitably going to happen down the road), the AI output will get stale, so to say. Interesting
@eugen_blick Yeah, I've heard of that. It seems to be called AI cannibalism. I don't think, however, there's a big deal as long as they're uncanny. It'll become more serious when they get the same reality as the genuine things.