From the Vault: Beyond the Uncanny Valley

Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In Today is going to be the second part of a two part series we're doing on the Uncanny Valley. Last time we ventured into the Uncanny Valley, so if you haven't heard that episode, you should go back and listen to that. First, we lay a lot of the groundwork for what we're gonna be talking about today, But we explored the origination of the concept of the Uncanny Valley, what it means means to to be in the Uncanny Valley, and some research

on whether this valley actually exists or not. Today, I think we want to start off by looking at if, if it does exist, what might be some explanations for it. Indeed. Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna dive into it a bit more and move as the title, uh suggests, beyond the Uncanny Valley. But before we do that, I do want to talk about RoboCop. Of course you want to talk about RoboCop, because we talked about RoboCop pretty much every day. Yeah,

it's it's it's an important film. Important films, I'll say, at least the at least the first two, arguably the third one to throwing the TV series if you like. But there was a TV series, Yeah, RoboCop TV series. It was one of those that would I think it would come on sci Fi or it came on various cable channels. I only have a vague awareness of it because it seemed to be a far lower key RoboCop

type show. Okay, So in many of the studies that we talked about in the last episode, they were looking at largely three categories of of robots and humans and androids. So you had pure robots things that are just undeniably machines and we're mostly okay with. Then you have humans or or or perfect human replications. Okay, So you look at it, it either is a human or it's such a good representation of a human ideally that you would

not think that it was a robot. Right. The third category here is where you're going to get into the danger zone, right, the human like robots, where you look at it and you say, I see what you're going for there, but it's creeping me out. So I think it's interesting to align this up with the Holy Trinity of robocops. Okay, so this will mostly make sense if you've seen the RoboCop films, but I feel like most people know what we're talking about here. First of all,

you had the proto RoboCop and two oh nine. Oh, this is maybe the greatest scene in the first film is before we get a humanoid RoboCop, they just have this big drone object that is supposed to enforce the law and it ends up shooting somebody in the boardroom. Yeah, it's a walking law enforcement tank with a robot commanding robot voice, so that you look at it and there's no to not know this is not a friendly device. But it's not really humanoid at all, not really at all.

It hit just walks on big, big legs that can't even navigate human stairs. But I would say, I have great affinity for ed to oh nine, Yeah, I mean, you know, without having to worry about it actually shooting me. It's kind of cute in a way. Now, then we have RoboCop itself himself, the classic RoboCop, the Peter Peter Weller, and uh, he is a cyborg or perhaps an android,

depending on how you want to view the descriptions. So he's he has a relatable, living human face which is a fixed to to honor him in some some explanations, or has to make him more comfortable not only as a police killing machine but also a community law enforcement officer. So RoboCop, you know, moves around with very robotic movements, speaks in a very robotic voice, but his face is

a living human face. So in a way like that, that seems like it might it just sort of you know, to read perhaps more into the original film than was intended. Perhaps this was a way to to get beyond the Uncanny Valley. We can't replicate the human face, We'll just get an actual human face from the dead cop and

just plaster it up there. Oh but I'd say RoboCop with his mask on really does kind of get into the uncanny Valley and and Weller does some good work forcing us in there, Like I think they're the sort of going for it. Yeah, okay, Well that brings us to the next generation RoboCop two, which is not just the name of the second RoboCop movie, but also the model of RoboCop that replaced the original RoboCop. They think, Hey, what would happen if we put tom noon in there?

That's right, So they have another essentially a walking tank kind of like d to O nine, except it's powered by the brain of a psychotic drug lord named Kane played by Tom Noonan. He's fabulous in it. Uh, but here's the here's the thing. It's walking around, it's killing everything with a gatling gun, but then it can pop a flat screen TV out of it out of the front of its body, and on that screen is a twisted uncanny lawnmower Man esque c g I face of

tom Noonon. Yeah, so that one really leans into the Uncanny Valley. Well yeah, and this this does point out another thing, which is that there have been plenty of intentional realizations of the Uncanny Valley in film when when people are trying to create an unsettling, unpleasant, humanoid for story purposes, if it's supposed to be a villain, if it's supposed to make people uncomfortable, because that's its role in the plot. So one thing I kind of wish

we'd done. I hadn't even thought about this is too if we could talk to somebody who has intentionally made things in the Uncanny Valley? What did they do on purpose to get it there? If your your job is to make a humanoid robot or an animated humanoid figure that intentionally pushes all the bad buttons and climbs as far down into the valley as it can, what do you do that would that would provide some really interesting

insight into what it actually takes to get there. Well, you know, to come back to video games, something that comes up a lot. You see these videos going viral where it's like just a cut scene or a clip from the video game with a humanoid character in a more or less human situation, except something screwed up in the face is missing, so it's just two floating eyeballs

and maybe a floating set of digital teeth. So the context is key there, Like this thing is acting as if it had a face, and it's in an environment where we're unsupposed to just roll with it, but clearly something's wrong. Yes, okay, Well, as we said in the last episode, we talked about the origin of the idea, We talked about evidence for and against the fact that the Uncanny Valley actually exists, to to the point that

it actually does exist to some extent. Maybe not in the naive original sense everybody would say, where it's just related to the amount of realistic human nous in a figure, but has other dimensions as well. What causes our Uncanny Valley reaction? Obviously people do have this reaction they see a humanoid robot or a humanoid animated character, the Scorpion King, the Final Fantasy, the spirits within characters, whatever it is, and we get so, what causes it? Why do our

brains react that way? Is it biological? Is it pure instinct? Is it a learned psychological reaction? Is it part of our culture? Is something coming from cognitive dissonance of some sort? Now, to go back to the origins of the idea with massive hero Mari in nineteen seventy and his original paper on the Uncanny Valley, Morey speculates that the Uncanny Valley might be a side effect of the self preservation instinct. In other words, it's a biological adaptation that helps us

avoid disease and death. Uh. And he starts with the observation that when a normal, healthy person becomes sick and eventually dies, they basically tend to slide down from the second peak of the uncanny valley, what we were calling the realism peak, the reality peak, and slide down into the uncanny valley. It's like they become more like these

upsetting puppets and robots. You know. They might uh suffer some kind of change in their in their the the appearance of their skin, of their eyes, of their facial expressions. Things begin to look off about them. And he writes, quote, the sense of eeriness is probably a form of instinct that protects us from proximal rather than distal sources of danger. Proximal sources of danger include corpses, members of different species, and other entities we can closely approach. Distal sources of

danger include windstorms and floods. You know, this is interesting that the mention of other species. Um. I don't know how many films and documentaries I've seen of say, lions running around in the natural habitat, and it's almost never creepy. No, not not at all, and yet and then mostly a lot of times when I'm in a zoo, it's not creepy.

But there have been times I take my son to the zoo a lot here in Atlanta, and there are times when we go down to the lion enclosure and we're the only people there at the zoo because we've arrived super early, and we just we're hanging out with

a lion on the other side of the glass. You know, we're perfectly safe, but a deep uneasiness comes over me, washes over me, and uh, and I'm just confronted by the the the danger of this situation, Like there's a danger that that goes beyond any reason because I am in close proximity to a dangerous member of another species, a carnivorous um predator, tory animal that would, in under

normal conditions, potentially kill me. Now there is I would bet a very different kind of sensation going on inside you when you're in proximity to a lion than when you see a creepy looking humanoid robot or a creepy looking animation human animation, right like it's it's probably exciting the difference between the when when we talked about the creepiness episode the creep the difference between the sort of like uncomfortable threat ambiguity versus sensing that there truly is

a threat of some kind. Right, And you know, we spoke to illness here, you know, like certainly someone we talked about like what happens when a co worker walks up to you and they're they're sniveling or more a little bit pale, uh and they say, let's French. Well, well hopefully not, but yeah, there's a there's an at least an initial sense of, oh, what's wrong with this person? Um? I wonder if what they have as contagious, should they

even be at work? I hope they cover their mouth when they sneeze, because we are going to be concerned on some level with catching whatever they have. If it's if it's it's transmittable, right and it I mean there are some ways in which we know that seeing illness and other people in sights a reaction in the disgust response, right. Yeah. And there's been actually a lot of research on the

discussed the disgusted response. Darwin wrote about it discussed from an evolutionary standpoint, is all about disease avoidance, you know, like do not eat this, you know, stay away from Yeah, something's not right here. You might hurt yourself or get sick. So we're talking about sensuous disgust, So discuss that's tied

to the senses to sense information that we're absorbing. Uh. This is deeply seated in the insula, the area of the brain that that malfunctions in patients with obsessive compulsive disorder, causing them to say, you know, wash and clean things endlessly or vacuum unrelenting lye. So the malfunk of that area gives us, you know, gives us a clue into its functionality. Uh. One interesting fact about disgusting smells, however, is that there's a drop off point for bad smell recognition,

but not for good smells. So I think we've all encountered this where it's that like say, say you're in your your office and and you share your office with a cat box, and at some point the cat uh causes quite a stink in there, and you register it first, and like, geez, I should stop what I'm doing and clean out that cat box. But you keep working, and

then after a while you don't smell it anymore. But then maybe you step outside to check the mail, or you go to the you know, the grocery store to pick something up, or you know, your partner comes home and when when you or they enter the room, you go cheese. What happened in here? Did the cat do

something again? No, you're just re smelling with their Originally you forgot about it, right, Yeah, the the brain kind of decides, Look at this point, I assume you know that she that the cheese is nasty and you're not going to eat it um or or that yes, there is animal poop around here. It's it's done, it's part

it's warned you. But the good smell will keep resonating because the good smell is probably saying, hey, there's something over here, delicious to eat with some fresh berries or whatnot, And it'll keep saying, hey, the berries are still here, why haven't you eaten them yet? This is there's not a lot of sugar out here. You should get at these berries while you have a chance. So the beautiful

remains beautiful, The sweet smelling remains sweet smelling. But something that is disgusting even as you know, discussing as a foul smell we can grow accustomed to. Okay, so what's the analogy to the Uncanny Valley here? Well, I think the the analogy here is that if you have a disgusted response to the to visual sense information regarding an individual's appearance, a robots appearance, of a computer animated characters appearance, there could there could also be this disgust drop off

point as you grow accustomed to it. Oh, and that's something that we have seen. We talked about a little bit in the last episode, and that uh, some people attest that when you spend time around these robots or uh, well it was mainly for the robots. The robots that at first seemed creepy, they stop bothering you become accustomed to them, they're not creepy anymore. I don't so much know if that's always going to be the case for

creepy looking animated humans. Um, but who knows. Now. Another thing to keep in mind too, is that the discussed response is going to depend on a number of different factors, some of which are going to be tied to hormonal situations. So, for instance, pregnant women are more sensitive to discussed and this is linked to their elevated progesterone levels. So uh, And of course there's gonna be other factors beyond that

for every individual. Yeah. So I think that there's certainly could be some amount of biological instinctual response going on in the uncanny value effect to the extent that it exists. But I think also, based on what we've seen so far, probably does not account for all of it. Uh. And I think another thing to consider would be going to

more more complex sort of cognitive psychology, such as cognitive dissonance. Now, if you were to just ask me what I thought was the most likely answer before I got into the research, I would intuitively tend to think that the best answer for what causes the Uncanny value effect primarily is our inherent discomfort with category confusions. Uh. This is something that I think about a lot, in like the creation of

monster mythology and stuff like that. We we don't like the feeling produced by by things that don't fit into our normal taxonomys for objects in the world and seem to violate our tax taxonomic ordering system. And this is why I think monsters are so often hybrids of existing things a bull's head on a man's body, things that defy our intuitive classification rules. They make us uncomfortable and cause a sense of unease, leading to this uncanny feeling.

So that that's what I would have intuitively said, Yeah, that makes sense. Is it wolf or is it man? Or right? But negative affinity resulting from this difficulty and assigning the entity to a category is it robot or human? Despite my intuitive favor for this explanation, I think it looks like experimental evidence for this is not strong, and in fact, in some ways some of the studies we've

looked at have somewhat invalidated this. For example, in the last episode at the end, I was talking about that study by matherin Rifling, and it did not find evidence of a strong correlation between here. Here's what you notice here the time it took people to rate the mechano humanoid qualities of a robot, and that robot pictures likability.

So if you were talking it up to category confusion, you would probably think the robots that people took the longest time to figure out how to ray on the mechano humanoid scale, and those would be the least likable, right, Because they're the ones causing the most category confusion, right. But I mean you could also say that, well, you're not maybe having not a you're not having a visceral gut reaction to them either, you having to think it out and try and you know, analyze how you feel

about it. Oh yeah, I'd say that's exactly what we don't like. I mean, we like to be able to viscerally categorize things. But but then the uncanny Valley is often, at least in terms of the way you're going to find it invoked by the average person. It's often discussed if it's as if it's a visceral reaction, the sort of i'll kill it with fire reaction that people might have, where I hate that saying yes, I'm not a fan as well, especially when it is applied to outside of

of a fictional connotations. Right. But so they point out the authors here point out that they did not find this. Uh. They point out that it's just not a fact that the things that took longer to look at and decide where the least likable. Though while this is not statistically important, just as a point of curiosity, the single face that took the longest to rate on the mechanical versus humanoid quality. Was also just about the most disliked face in their

whole collection of faces, but that was just like one outlier. Overall, this did not present as a general effect. Other studies have also looked into this and have failed to find solid evidence for category confusion as the primary driver of the negative affinity at the bottom of the uncanny valley. So it looks like my intuitions here I think are wrong. But there's something that's kind of related as an idea that's been explored, and that is the idea of perceptual mismatch.

So several authors have advocated the idea that this perceptual mismatch could be the primary cause of what we don't like about things that we would intuitively say fall into the uncanny valley. So one piece of research I want to mention is a sort of review by uh Cat Siri that is a review of empirical evidence on different uncanny valley hypotheses support for perceptual mismatch as one road to the valley of eerieness that gott to give it

a different name, apparently in Frontiers in Psychology. And so in this study, the authors review present research and claim that experimental research attempting to show the Uncanny Valley has been inconsistent. They don't exactly say that the uncanny valley doesn't exist, but that it's not as simple as often believed to be. Something we've been saying for a while now. It's it's not that any manipulation of the variable of

human likeness leads to Uncanny Valley effects. So, in other words, that the horizontal axis on the graph is more complicated than just the question of how realistically human is it. I've seen this come up enough now that I'm pretty convinced that that is not necessarily the only or even the primary factor here. But they still recognize that there is some kind of effect here. So they claim that there's evidence against the category confusion basis that we were

just talking about. But they claim that there has been good evidence in support of the perceptual mismatch hypothesis. And I want to read what they say. They say quote taken together, the present review suggested that although not any kind of human likeness manipulation leads to the Uncanny Valley, the uncanny valley could be caused by more specific perceptual

mismatch conditions. Such conditions could originate at least from inconsistent realism levels between individual features, and the examples they give would be like artificial eyes on a humanlike face, or the presence of atypical features such as a typically large

eyes on an otherwise humanlike character. So what they're saying there is not necessarily that you can't tell whether it's a robot or a human, but that there have been multiple experiments that seem to show people are unsettled and made unhappy by things where the features on the face or the features of the figure as a whole are

inconsistently realistic. Like, we're more okay with a robot that's consistently realistic at a certain level it maybe say, seventy percent than something that has eyes at nine d percent and skin at This reminds me, this is just coming off the top of my head. So I don't have the artist's name here, but there's there's an artist who's worth made the rounds where they took cartoon characters and they depicted them realistically. So it's Homer Simpson. Yes, Homer

Simpson with like pores on his skin, you know, horrible. Yeah, So that comes to mind is a kind of a possible example of this. Yeah. I think that's a good explanation. So I want to get into my main takeaways from looking at the Uncanny Valley research so far. Maybe you can let me know what you think about this. I'd say, first of all, I think the Uncanny Valley is a real thing, but it's not as simple as Maury's original

hypothesis would lead you to believe. Uh. First of all, people definitely do get creeped out by lots of almost human looking things, but it's not a necessarily just that the near failed human realism is what makes them unsettling. There are other things that appear to be making them unsettling though, that the near humanness plays some kind of role. And the other big thing is that there appear to

be multiple dimensions to explain the phenomenon. Right, So, synthetic humanoid images, whether robotic or animated, offer multiple dimensions of attraction and revulsion. I think it's possible that there are some biologically triggered effects the appearance of health or disease,

the appearance of life or death. But then I think there are possibly other things triggered by psychological cognitive dissonance, probably not category confusion, um, but but some good evidence for this idea of the perceptual mismatch being the cause. And then the final thing is that the Uncanny Valley effect is context dependent. How long have you been exposed

to the image in what's setting? Is it part of a narrative or some other context in which you're being asked to suspend your disbelief or otherwise put yourself in a state of openness. Robert, what do you think about

all this so far? You've got any disagreement? No, I mean I I feel like my view on it closely lines up with with with yours here basically that it's just that there is an effect going on, but it's far it's far more nuanced than simply oh these are these are the factors that make something fall into the Uncanny Valley, not just how realistically human. There's there's other stuff going on, right, and not just a mere hybridization.

It was instantly thinking about um, the borg and UH and occasionally the sort of sexy boards that show up in the Star Trek universe. No, like, there's there's clearly category confusion going on there, but they're they're not depicted as particularly uncanny, Like was the board queen? Was she uncanny? Kind of? I don't know, I mean, even when I'm not a big fan of the way the board look well,

but the outside of the board. You can also think of, you know, various sort of hybrid human creatures depicted in fantasy and fiction that that are created in such a way to be the alluring, uh, like they managed to fetishize the inhuman qualities of them the category of confusion. Yeah, uh yeah. It makes me think that there are certain qualities of the human appearance that, if altered, are much more significant in terms of our affects response than others.

So it could be and I'm just making this up. I don't know if this is true, but that like, uh, getting the getting the size of the eyes wrong could quite easily lead to a disgust response and revulsion. But getting the size of the nose wrong wouldn't. Does that make sense? Yeah? Yeah? Or just thinking of eyes, like definitely making the eyes inappropriately large leads a creepy factor, and this is often employed. I instantly think of the Van Piate movie. What twenty thirty Days of Night? Is

that the name of it? Oh? Something like that. Yeah, where they did some sort of digital effect to make ority. I don't remember the number, some number of days of PPD, days of night. Um. I didn't actually see if the trailers were we're certainly interesting. But likewise, if you just take an individual and have them wear blackout contact lenses like that is often sometimes that's played up for creepiness, but a lot of times it's played up for to

be alluring. You'll have uh, male or female characters that are are otherwise dressed in some alluring fashion, but they have blacked out eyes and it's who It's kind of like supernatural, sexy, cool, as opposed to just like, oh my god, why why are your eyes pits of darkness? Yeah, but maybe that's just me. Okay, well, I think we should take a quick break and when we come back,

we will go beyond the Uncanny Valley. All right, we're back, Okay, So Robert, I can recall discussions going back for years about whether we're going to make it out of the Uncanny Valley in the realm of robotics or animation, and I think from here on I want to focus primarily on animation, just to just to keep us focused and I think there are actually two separate questions here, assuming that the Uncanny Valley is to some extent to coherent idea.

We've already explained all the ways in which it's obviously way more complicated than the naive popular culture culture understanding of it. But the two big questions. Number one, can we make realistic looking humanoid characters that aren't creepy? I think the answer here is yes. I think it's not a two dimensional graph. I think you can make things that aren't quite photo realistic but look realistic that aren't creepy.

Current generation video games have been doing this, and as I mentioned in the last episode, I think that there are tricks to doing this. It's apparently in achieving like the right combination of realistic traits and unrealistic traits that maybe you would just land on by doing trial and error in design over time. You would never mistake these characters for photographs of real humans. But they're also not cartoony. They've got this feeling of really real ishness, if you

know what I mean. But they've they've they've attained sort of a generally acceptable plateau of realistic affect. But they're not skewing into these different danger zones adjacent photo realism, where the shortcomings become creepy and off putting and we don't like it. Then there would be another question, and that's just can we make animated characters that are robustly indistinguishable from human like, can we get all the way up the other side of the mountain, up to the

peak of reality? And last week, if you'd ask me, my personal answer would have been no, not yet. But I think that's actually not as clear cut as we would first guess, because you think that perhaps many of the humans we see on TV are actually digital creations. Oh I know, for a act that that who's that guy, that Jimmy Fallon guy? Oh yeah, Jimmy Fallon might be a computer generated that is not a person. He has been generated by a computer that's in Palo Alto, California.

It's a super computer. I mean, it's a really good computer. But yeah, well, I often feel the same way about Michael Fastbender, And granted it's complicated by the fact that he has he has a thing for playing androids recently, but at times you're just like, no, he's just a little too handsome. There's something in human about this this man's handsomeness in his charm. So I want to talk about one thing that is that has given me pause on this subject. And it's going back to what we

talked about at the beginning of the last episode Rogue one. Yes, so back to the c G I Grand mof Tarken when I saw When I first saw Rogue one, I liked a lot of things about the movie, but I did not really like the the c g I. Tarken. The the almost Peter Cushing was very, very good, and I really mean that, I'm shockingly good, but still not quite real to me, still kind of distracting because of how slightly off it was. I would not have mistaken

it for a real person. But the other day I was talking in the office to Holly fry Who it's It's Holly, a Star Wars fan. She's so, she's one of the hosts of Stuff You Missed in History Class, one of our one of our podcasts in the podcast family here. Yeah, she has hands down the most Star Wars knowledgeable person in the office in an office full of nerds. Yeah, I should point out that Holly has slash had like a golden ticket to go see Rogue one anytime she wanted to at the theater. What are

you serious? And serious? This is? Yeah, yeah, legit, where'd that come from? I don't know, I don't know. I'm not I'm not at that level of a fandom where I'm even offered such things. I know. So if if you want to have a funny experience, go up to Holly and just like, ask some really obscure random question about Star Wars where you think it could not be possible that there's an actual answer to this, like oh, that stormtrooper on the left, where did he? What planet

was he born on? Holly will have an answer. She'll be like, oh, that was actually addressed in dialogue in the Greek dub of this episode of Clone Wars. So Holly has amazing Star Wars knowledge. She's super fun to

talk to about the Star Wars universe. But anyway, Holly pointed out that while a lot of people like me were saying that the c G I. Tarkan was a few pixels short of escaping the valley, then again, there were plenty of people, including some older people that she knew, who couldn't tell that it wasn't a real person they literally they couldn't tell. Well, I'm worried about my viewing upcoming viewing of the film because I have I've been preconditioned to have a certain response to the to the

Tarkan bot here. Oh, I'm sorry that we've had this discussion before you were able to see the movie for yourself. It'll be interesting being preconditioned. Will I go into it, you know, expecting an abomination and like, but the level of detail will overwhelm me and it won't matter. Or Am I going to go into there and nothing is gonna fool me because I'm gonna be looking for the cracks? You know, I can, I can put myself in a

mindset where I think it's possible. I might not have known that it was a c g I effect if I wasn't familiar with what to look for, Like if I didn't watch a lot of movies that had c g I effects in them, and if I didn't complain about c G I a lot. I'm sorry, guilty is charged,

I'm guilty of that. Uh. If I wasn't aware that Peter Cushing was dead, um, if it wasn't if I wasn't sort of prepared to see a lot of high tech c g I by virtue of the fact that I'm sitting in a theater for a Lucasfilm movie, all those things. If you took away all the context and my pre knowledge, I'm very might possibly have fallen for it. I think I might have just it might have just gone past me. If I was absorbed in the story, I might have thought, Yeah, it's kind of strange looking dude,

but it's just a dude. And I think it gets better or worse, depending on your perspective. So I have in October news piece from BBC Asia here about a character called Saia, a computer animated character created by the Japanese husband and wife graphic design team Terry Yuki and Yuka Ishikawa. And I mentioned this one in particular because before we did this episode, I went and I looked up what are considered a lot of the most realistic

c g I character creations, the most impressive animations. This one came up, and I think this was the most impressive to me. It's probably the most photo real computer generated human I've come across so far. So Siah is supposed to be a seventeen year old Japanese student and The creators have been working on her design for a couple of years now, and as versions of Saia have been posted on the Internet, people have widely reacted with comments like, I can't believe that's not a real person.

And I kind of have to agree. I'm looking at these these pictures of her. There are a couple of different generations of her design up and the most recent one just looks like a photograph of a person. Yeah, I I can't tell that that is not a person. I have no recourse to critical faculties in my mind that would say no, here's where you can tell that

that's not a real person. Now. At the same time, I do have to come back to a comment I made earlier that that this is also a it's a it's a it's a pretty face, it's a very standard face like this is this is leading lady material, Whereas I think it gets more problematic when you look at character actor type figures such Peter Cushing, because they have such a distinctive face. Yes, and Peter Cushing. So this is one thing that helps, I think, is that it's

a young character who has very smooth features. Uh, Peter Cushing has a lot of cracks and crags, a lot of wrinkles, and I think that that may actually be simply having more texture on your face could make it much more difficult to make a photo real copy of you.

That that's entirely possible. But to get back to Saia, So in October of last year, the Artist's debuted the first animated clip of Siah, which they created using motion capture technology, and they debuted at a Japanese consumer electronics show. I watched this footage and I think Morey's distinction about having different standards for motion and still images does apply because while with the still image, I can't tell that's not a real person, with the short animated clip, I can.

I can tell it's not a real person, but it's still very very impressive, not as absolutely photo real as the still images. But I don't know. I wonder to what extent this gap is just um that motion animation is a bigger technical project, it takes more investment and money and all that, um, And to what extent the gap is within the viewers mind essentially, to what ext and it's caused by the fact that the climb out of the uncanny valley is steeper if you're moving. Now.

I know we're not talking about robots here, but this, of course, this brings up the thought that as where as we attempt to conquer this in the realm of humanoid robotics, you're gonna inevitably have situations where, oh, it looks just like a person if it's walking down the street, but if it climbs stairs. There you go. It's not necessarily going to add to oh nine the lights in the air, but maybe there would be something telling like, oh,

it looks like a human most of the time. But they're gonna be certain movements, certain environmental reactions that are just not going to hold up to scrutiny, right, So, I don't know. Looking at these things, looking at Tarkan in Rogue one, looking at Siah, I think it's clear that we're getting closer and closer to really bridging the gap on indistinguishable photo real humanity in computer animation. Whether you'd call that an uncanny valley or not, obviously this

is a related but maybe different an issue. What we're definitely drawing near is that peak of reality where there are synthetically generated images of humans that you can't tell from the real thing, and since things in the Uncanny Valley are creepy, I think we usually just assume that overcoming it is a good thing, right, like designs getting better? Uh. In't it kind of cool that we can generate these photo real images without without actually having to photograph someone.

But I'm not so sure that's a good thing. I think we should maybe think about the implications of this, like what would happen in the world where human simulations, especially computer animation, can reliably climb up that second peak. So we are going to take a quick break and when we come back, we will go beyond the Uncanny Valley. All right, we're back. You know, I'm glad you brought up this idea of you know, is it a bad thing?

Is it a good thing? It does remind me of a fabulous book that came out a few years back. I think I just referenced it in our Sex Spots episode titled The wind Up Girl by Paolo baglapi Um. It's a near future science fiction tale, just really a wonderful novel, very fun, but that the wind Up Girl

in question is a essentially a sex Spot character. It goes you know, that ends up rebelling and you have sort of a typical narrative with her, but they call her a wind up girl because she's she's she's very convincing as a humanoid, except that her skin pours are too small and she has an intentionally herkey jerky movement to uh to as she walks around. That they did so that she could not be mistaken as a person.

So that so that apparently, like all the I think they were called the new people, it's in some cases so that the new people could not be mistaken for the old people. Whoa It reminds me of how they had to add artificial sounds to electric cars for safety purposes. Because the cars are too quiet, they can really sneak up on you from behind, so they had to make them rumble a little bit. Yeah, I think that's an

app comparison. So here's a question for you, Robert, what is the gold standard of evidence that somebody did something? Imagine you're on a jury. I'm the defendant. I've been accused of offering a cash bribe to a police officer if she'll let me borrow her gun for five minutes. She says, I did it. I plead not guilty. What what's the best evidence to convince you that I really

did that. Well, it's not human memory, because if we've touched on many times before, human memory is falliable and and it's a legitimate problem when it comes to to eyewitness testimony. But when the eyewitness is a video camera, a digital camera that has a long photographic evidence as well to certain degrees, like this has been held up as the gold standard. I mean, assuming the footage is

clear enough that the individual's face is visible, all of that. Uh. Like even in our science fiction, right, we have so many examples of like on Star Trek, again, there would be scenes where Picard would command it we zoom in and enhance and it was never questioned that there were any problems with the enhancing of the image. It was just something that was done. It's like, oh, yeah, the image is enhanced, and now we see exactly who the killer is. Huh. So we should look at this this

booming new research field. I shouldn't say booming, I just mean there are some papers on it, okay, called facial reenactment. So this employs some of the same techniques that you would see used in uh in studios. If if people are doing motion capture for c g I characters In movies and video games. You have an actor performer who puts on special gear and a special environment surrounded by

lights and cameras, and the performer acts out motions. These motions are captured from multiple angles and different lighting conditions, and then they're translated by a computer into the motions of a c g I character. You could make a c g I me that was doing all the same things I did with my body. But what if instead of a c g I character you used captured motion to manipulate existing video or images of a real person,

not a c g I character. This technology is already in development today, and one example is the research being done under the heading as I said, of facial reenactment.

There are a couple of papers along with accompanying video demonstrations by a group of researchers based out of Stanford, out of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and the University of Erlangen Nuremberg, and in their own words quote, we present a method for the real time transfer of facial expressions from an actor in a source video to an actor in a target video, thus enabling the ad hoc control of the facial expressions of the target actor. And so if you haven't seen video of this, you

should look it up trying facial reenactment video. If you have efficient sample video of your target, you can use a regular camera to project new facial expressions, including mouth movements which form the shapes of words, onto your your

target in your video. So I could take video of Robert talking if I had all this technology, if I could take video of Robert talking, and then I could film myself saying Halloween five is the best entry in the Halloween franchise, and then map that onto Robert's face to make his lips say those words, to make his face move along with my face as it's being recorded. And in the demonstrations of this it looks nearly photo real. They do it with with public figures, making them move

their faces around, move their lips to say things. In some cases, I think the average observer already would not be able to tell the difference in this video and in fact that a similar thing appears to be happening with voice. This thing you might have read about last year of this thing Adobe Voco, where they came out with this announcement that Adobe is working on software where you can take a twenty minute sample of your audio

to learn from. If you've got a recording of somebody talking for twenty minutes, I can take it, make a recording of you saying things you never said in your own voice. I wanna. I seem to remember that before his death, Roger Ebert was involved with the project with

some of this technology. The idea of being that, of course he had lost his his availability to talk due to illness, but there was so much Roger Ebert audio out there from all of his years as a as a as a film critic and a TV personality that they had this they had, they had everything they needed to enable him to say anything new. Yeah, and that

that explores the totally non nefarious aspect of this. I mean, I I don't think people who are pursuing these lines of research are just trying to create a world where we can fake video evidence of things. But wouldn't that be a wonderful thing for somebody who lost their capacity for speech they had recordings of their voice to be able to create a text to speech voice box that could speak with their own voice. That's amazing, that's kind

of beautiful. But there are these other ways of looking at this, and the authors also that they point out that, you know, they they in their own defense, they're like, look, we're not trying to create a world where people can fake video. We also try to show how you can detect altered video. So that's another thing they're trying to explore and make public because you know, they're not the

only people pursuing this research. Obviously, people all over the place are doing stuff like this, and stuff like this has been in the use, has been in use in the movie industry for years. Yeah, I mean it makes me think that what you would need to go for

is the equivalent of a water mark. I don't know exactly what that watermark would be and what form it would take, but it does make me think, well, we're going to reach a point where any kind of footage has to have the watermark of authenticity, otherwise doubt will

be asked upon it. Yeah, I'm concerned about the idea of living in a world where you can make very convincing looking fake video evidence of things, and not just because of the specific example of somebody can make a video of me or somebody I like, you know, saying or doing something that they didn't do. It's not just the specifics, it's the general degrading of our trust in the ability to look at things and know that they're true. Yeah.

I mean, we look at the current news cycle and there's been a lot of discussion about the reliability of information, of so called fake news, the idea that you read, do you reach this point where nobody knows what to trust anymore? Set of just trusting nothing? And you already know this because you don't trust any weird looking picture of somebody you see, right, because you know what can be done with photoshop. We're already there with still images.

Photoshop is is basically in many contexts become a verb for for the the distortion of truth. But what what if we had photoshop to undermine moving video evidence to the same extent that photoshop has undermined still images. I mean, this is what a lot of these viral fake news

stories are based on, is a photoshopped image. If you go to Snopes or something and you look at what a lot a lot of what they're debunking is, it's just an image that claims to be real of somebody doing something, and they have to track down where it came from Yeah, it's difficult to imagine what that what would slash will be like when we reach that point to where there's where where video even digital footage is

no longer the gold standard it was. I mean, I think it's actually a very important project to maintain a version of the Uncanny Valley, to to help people find a way to all to separate real video evidence from fake video evidence of things, to understand that there are things you can look for that separate real moving imagery

from falsified or synthetic moving imagery. Now, one way you can approach this is to do what the authors of this research I was talking about do is they say, look, here are things that are are signs that video has been manipulated. And that's one thing. And maybe there will be a lot of experts on this in the future, Like it could be a whole field of people who are just there to have expertise in authenticating purportedly real

video of you doing things or not. Uh. Then on the other hand, we could hope that there is in fact an adaptive response in our discernment in general. And this is where I want to go to the concept of an of the uncanny Wall. So paper in the International Journal of Arts and Technology, authored by Tinwell Grimshawn Williams offers this interesting counter hypothesis to the Uncanny Valley.

And I want to emphasize again we've sort of shifted back and forth betwe in the Uncanny Valley itself in terms of what causes negative affinity, and then over slightly just to the issue of nearing photo realism or not. So keep in mind the difference in those subjects. But

they proposed this idea of the uncanny wall. To put it succinctly, they proposed that quote, increasing technological sophistication in the creation of realism for humanlike virtual characters is matched by increasing technological discernment on the part of the viewer. In other words, as humanoid characters become more real, our

standards for what looks realistic go up. And I do think they're just anecdotally personally that I think there's some support for this, and I kind of hope this is true so we can avoid this world where all video evidence is in question. Because I immediately think, right now, I've got I've got antennae for photoshopped images, unlike had ten years ago. I think stuff that would look obviously photoshop to me today would have fooled me ten years ago.

I think I've simply adapted. And another thing is it makes me flashback to the early days of c g I in movies and like the thirty two bit video game era, or think about like PlayStation one games and back then. I remember looking at games for the original PlayStation and thinking, wow, that looks so real. And you try and play him now and it's painful. Yeah, you can't blocky polygons. People's faces have all these sharp corners.

It's it's hilarious. Uh, there was some kind of geometrical nightmare world everything was taking place in where there's just lots of sharp angles. But at the time it looked so real to me. And another fun trick is go back and read movie reviews for movies with bad c g I from the nineties. Professional movie reviewers at the time, we're often praising the X. One example is like the Mortal Kombat movie, the original Mortal Kombat movie. Remember this.

You can find reviews at the time where people are like, well, the stories then an immature but dazzling special effects. Now even mentioning those special effects conjures a kind of delirious hilarity. You just start laughing when you think about the c G I in Mortal Kombat. But that being said, the GOA puppet was above reproach, really good. It did have kind of nasty beady eyes, kind of crypt keeper ask. Yeah, oh yeah, it was like a very It was like

a bloated, buffed up crypt kicker. But yeah, it's so ugly it provokes uncontrollable laughter. But at the time people were like, dazzling, looks amazing. Uh. So it makes me think that I hope that there is something to this, this idea that these authors have that as things continue to chase photo realism, as synthetic imagery of humans gets closer and closer to the real thing, we just get more and more attuned to the minute problems with them

with them and never really get fully fooled. Well. I have two thoughts here, One on the whole water mark thing. Maybe it would be some sort of a Bitcoin type of authentication system that would be in place. Uh. The other is maybe you have to go beyond the real maybe safe for a head of state to appear in

a video and it'd be authentic. They have to appear as an as a computer generated avatar so advanced than it is that it is beyond the ability of any like non state production or company to create like something I'm I'm something that at this point in what would be their past, I cannot even conceive of, like a I don't know, like a five dimensional unfolding c g I god being, because how he's going to fake that?

You can fake a person, but good luck faking the fifth dimension hole of avatar or a fish new Okay, like like the algorithms for faking a person with a lot of photo and and audio visual cues to sample from. If you've got a lot of footage out there, you could simulate that person, But you couldn't simulate this brand new creation that is it requires you know, supercomputers to generate. And yeah, and it was probably built from the bottom

up with completely alien physiology and movements. Just a thought. That's kind of a crazy idea, but I like it. Well, that's what I'm here for with the crazy ideas. I don't know, have you got anything else, Robert, any anything else you can think of to save us from the future of uh synthetic human imagery? Oh? You know, I could sit around here all day and talk about c g I, monsters and UH and Uncanny Valley and films and video games and whatnot. But you don't have to

what to save that for another time. Maybe save some of it for trailer talk, which will If you're listening to this on a Thursday, hopefully you can tune in tomorrow around eleven am on our Facebook page. I like our Facebook page. While you're at it, follow us there, but tune into a little discussion of trailers that are associated with the Uncanny Valley. Oh yeah, And in the meantime, heading over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

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