The "Uncanny Valley"
English

The "Uncanny Valley"

by

art
cognitive science
fantasy
philosophy
horror

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").

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