Beyond Uncanny Valley
2D Akira vs 3D Holly
The uncanny valley is the sensation of unease we feel when a human character looks close to but not quite human.
For example, the character of Akira, is not realistic at all. We easily connect with this character and relate. No uncanny valley.
The character of Holly from The Polar Express looks more like a real person, but is not relatable. She feels strange and ghost-like.
This is the uncanny valley. When human characters are kinda real but obviously not real, they have an eerie or even repulsive effect on us.
The Luke Skywalker cameo in The Mandalorian was uber-uncanny
Computer-generated imagery has been around for at least forty years, but it has never conquered the uncanny valley. There has never been a truly believable CGI human character. Anybody who saw the conclusion of season 2 of The Mandalorian got treated to a Luke Skywalker cameo that didn’t look much better than The Polar Express.
The closest there’s been to believable CGI humans are human-like characters in movies like Avatar: The Way of Water or Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. These characters don’t feel uncanny because they’re not human.
The main reason the apes in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes looked so good was just because they’re not people.
AI is doing what CGI could not – it is crossing the uncanny valley. AI is generating human characters that are indistinguishable from real people.
There are now AI-generated still images of people that look real. Head over to ThisPersonDoesNotExist, and with every refresh of the page you’ll see a new portrait of a synthetic person. There are often small imperfections but these images are good enough to fool basically everyone.
Real? Not real? He’s not real but I can’t tell. Via ThisPersonDoesNotExist.
And we are now getting AI-generated video of realistic people. For instance, a new feature in the AI video app Captions creates realistic bloggers. If you watch these clips long enough, the illusion doesn’t hold, but in shorter durations, you can be fooled.
The vloggers generated by Captions look real, especially in short clips.
We are traveling beyond the uncanny valley. What comes next?
I can foresee two realities that will co-exist.
We will still very much have the uncanny valley. AI-generated humans mostly do not look real and creators won’t be focused on making perfectly realistic people. This is mostly what we’re going to see for a long time to come.
But sprinkled out there among the uncanny will be fake people who look real. “They” will be sharing their experiences, instructing us, persuading us, selling us, and seducing us.
What does this mean? Like everybody else, I’m still grappling with this emerging reality. I’m happy to hear your thoughts in the meantime.
But this I’m certain of: those old uncanny valley characters like Holly will soon feel nostalgic, emblems of simpler times when you could trust your eyes.