The uncanny valley is a common unsettling feeling people experience when androids (humanoid robots) and audio/visual simulations closely resemble humans in many respects but are not quite convincingly realistic. That feeling you might get when you look at an image and something just doesn’t feel right.
Masahiro Mori, at that time a robotics professor, wrote about the effect in a 1970 essay, Bukimi no Tani, which translates roughly as valley of eeriness. At that time, humanoid robots had yet to be developed. Mori was intrigued by the uneasy feeling that wax figures had always evoked in him. The English term uncanny valley was first mentioned in a 1978 book by Jasia Reichardt called "Robots: Fact, Fiction, and Prediction."
Commonly experienced with robotics and 3D animation including CGI films, shows, and in video games. Pictured here is a screenshot from Mass Effect: Andromena. The Uncanny Valley effect was a major point of contention for this game.
The uncanny valley is named for the way the viewer's level of comfort drops as a simulation approaches, but does not reach, verisimilitude. Near-realism and mixes of realism and surrealism most often cause the eerie sensation. The effect is intensified if the simulation is moving.
The Uncanny Valley is commonly experienced in robots meant to look human. Science shows that the effect is amplified when movement is applied.
Sex robots are becoming more and more advanced today. One of many points of controversy about this subject is the Uncanny Valley. The combination of the imperfect appearance and motion typically involved with sex can make for revolting experience.
The uncanny Valley can also be experienced through photoshopped images. Motion amplifies the effect, but it can still be felt when looking upon unnatural images. This has been a particular point of controversy among advertisements and professional modelling.
The Uncanny Valley can also be experienced as a result of plastic surgery. Though medical advances have made this less common today, particularly difficult or excessive amounts of facial alteration can still result in appearance unsettling to others.
The Uncanny Valley has been a subject in movies for about the last twenty years. It often comes about when making older actors appear younger or older than they truly are. Pictured here is “young” Patrick Stuart in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
Movies sometimes use digital effects to bring back actors who died in real life like in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Peter Cushing died in 1994, so the film makers put digital effects over another actor to bring his character of Tarkin back. Many complained of the Uncanny Valley effect.
A recent famous example came from 2017’s Justice League. Henry Cavill had to shoot Mission Impossible Fallout at the same time as JL’s reshoot, but was contractually obligated by Paramount to not shave his mustache for MI. So Warner Bros spent tens of millions of dollars to digitally remove his mustache from Superman in Post production. The results were not great.
Not all examples are negative however. Fast and Furious actor died in 2013 while Furious 7 was still filming. The film was completed using CGI over stand ins and Walker’s real life siblings. Many felt the effect was well made.
Another positive example came in this years Captain Marvel, where Samuel L. Jackson was digitally de-aged by twenty-five years. Many felt the effect was done perfectly, which is especially impressive as unlike Tarkin, Nick Fury appeared throughout the whole movie.
This Year’s Alita Battle Angel had a mixed response. Being based on a manga, the movie intentionally tried to apply the manga art style to real life faces. Some loved the ffect, while other complained of the unsettling nature of it.
A number of theories exist to potentially explain the Uncanny Valley and why humans experience it. Though there are many, today I’ll only go over a handful of the most commonly accepted theories.
Mortality salience: Viewing an "uncanny" robot elicits an innate fear of death and culturally-supported defenses for coping with death’s inevitability. A mechanism with a human façade and a mechanical interior plays on our subconscious fear that we are all just soulless machines. Since most androids are copies of actual people, they are doppelgängers and may elicit a fear of being replaced.
Violation of Human Norms: The nonhuman characteristics are noticeable, giving the human viewer a sense of strangeness. In other words, a robot stuck inside the uncanny valley is no longer judged by the standards of a robot doing a passable job at pretending to be human, but is instead judged by the standards of a human doing a terrible job at acting like a normal person. This has been linked to perceptual uncertainty and the theory of predictive coding.
Threat to humans’ distinctiveness and identity: Negative reactions toward very humanlike robots can be related to the challenge that this kind of robot leads to the categorical human – non-human distinction. These new machines challenge human uniqueness, pushing for a redefinition of humanness. The more a robot resembles a real person, the more it represents a challenge to our social identity as human beings. Entertainment has often depicted this theory resulting in discrimination against Artificial Intelligence.
In conclusion, the Uncanny Valley is phenomenon that has existed for as long as things meant to resemble humans has. In the last few years great strides have been made to mitigate the effect in the fields of medicine, robotics, and entertainment. But the cause of the Uncanny Valley may be a deep rooted survival instinct that is less easily overcome. We may have yet to see the true extent in which the Uncanny Valley effects people, but time will likely tell as further advances to cross the Uncanny Valley are made.
