Is the Uncanny Valley Real?

do any of that stuff. Yeah, I can't really either, and didn't really. If if you're claim to fame is like a really great robot dance, I don't know, maybe take up some other hobbies as well, kind of round that out. You don't want them to be the only thing you're good at, right, because if you list that on the dating site, you might turn ladies off. Yeah, according to e Harmony, Yeah, that's foreshadowing. I love that one, don't you. Yeah, that's some issues with that whole Oh yeah, yeah,

we'll get to that. This is tad all right. Well, let's start the at the beginning. Almost the beginning. Chuck, let's go back to nineteen seventy, which was the beginning of the greatest decade in the history of humanity. Yeah, neither one of us were born yet I can finally even say that I'm still not even born. It must feel good. Yeah, okay, well, welcome to the club. I guess. Thanks.

And in nineteen seventy, we're not just going just anywhere at nights seven, We're going to Japan in nineteen seventy. Japan was pretty cool in the seventies. Yeah, a lot of bell bottoms, a lot of ninja running around. Still, um, there were calculators being wheelded all over the place. Probably it was a good time, good good time for Japan, right, and one of the one of the things that was

going on in nineteen seventy. I could not, for the life of me find what issue of this journal it came out in what month, But at some point in nineteen seventy there was an obscure journal, a Japanese academic journal called Energy, and at some point during that year it published a article by a Japanese roboticist, and his

name is Massa Hiro Mori. Thank you, I have a lot of practice, and uh, Massa Hiro Omori uh published this article and he named it Bukimi no Tani gen show is actually the full name of the whole thing. And as we'll see, it's kind of difficult to translate into English, right, and it took many, many years after he wrote this article for it to be translated into

English for anybody even try to attempt it. So basically, Mori was this robotic cyst and he wrote this essay and at the time he just put it out there and went back to work, started teaching more and more roboticists. The whole new generation of roboticists learned under him and

his his work just kind of sat there. Um unobserved that article, i should say, and then in two thousand five a rough translation of it was leaked out wasn't intended for publication, and the world entirely changed, right because Massa Hiro Morty had in his article put his finger on something that no one had before in his capacities a roboticist and a human and that was what we call today the uncanny Valley. Yeah, so that's um the idea that, uh, you're making a robot and we'll see

this apply some more than just robots. But in his case, you're making a robot and you want to make it look like a person um, which I guess not all roboticists, some of them like the clunky jets and style robots like Rosy. But I guess if you're Mori, you're you're on the path to designing lifelike robots. And the closer

you get to that lifelike look, everything's going great. Everything's going great, people are like, this is so cool, this is so cool, and then all of a sudden, people go oh like right as it approaches it's most or basically, when it reaches its most lifelike capacity, that this whoever's making it can conjure people are repulsed by it. Yeah, which is something that most people who ever hear of the Uncanny Valley are like, yeah, you know, that's I've

noticed that. That's happened to me before too. But the thing is, Chuck, it doesn't it doesn't actually make sense, right, Like, we know a robot is a robot. Yeah, so you know, maybe you could be afraid that it's gonna like pick you up and break you in two or something like a cartoon, but that's different than being creeped out by like why would we be creeped out by a robot? And this is what Morey put his finger on, was there's something to this and it doesn't make sense, and

he he didn't. It wasn't even just um this article that he wrote. He created a graph as well that's become quite famous that um really kind of gets the point across more than anything else. Yeah, And he wasn't even the first person to to go over this and to put a put some thought to it. Freud of course, because he'd like to think about everything. He thought about a little bit. And before Freud, there was a a Geman name anst yinched. Oh nice. I did not realize

that's how his last name should be pronounced. That's good stuff. I think I put a tea on the end, but the teas in the middle, yinch. Yeah, I think that's right. I've been saying, Gentch. We don't. We'll have to look that up. Then. I think you're no. I think of the two of us, you're you got the German down. Uh. And he had a little term called um heimlich uh that he called it so like you know, different languages

had different names for it. Um and you go back in time, all the way back to like the seventeenth century, and people were and I guess you know, robots didn't look super lifelike back then, but whatever their version of life like was. Uh. In the sixteen hundreds, people were like, I don't like that. Why is it looking at me? Yeah, it's got a quill and it's writing things. But like you said, Maury made this graph because he was a roboticist, and he thought, you know, let's look at this on

a plotted out so we can stare at it. And on the X axis he had human likeness. Then on the y axis he had affinity, like whether or not you like the way this thing looks. And just as we're talking about um, the graph went up and up as uh, things got more lifelike and people like the way look And then at a certain point there's that valley there's a big dip. Uh. That really just kind of says it all right, And again this all makes sense intuitively, but as we'll see, that's it's been very

difficult to prove. And one of the reasons why it's confounded research thus far is because we were not even sure what more meant by some of the words he chose, at least as far as translating them to English. Right. Um For example, boukimi. Right, it was translated in two thousand five as uncanny, but um again that that original translation was not intended for publication, but it leaked out, and so Uncanny Valley became, you know, the the way we all think of it here in the West. But

boukimi more closely resembles something like eerie. Like I've seen it explain that, Um, a word like boukimi means more than uncanny is just weird or remarkable or noteworthy. It's not necessarily something that gives you the creeps. Boukimi is something that that gives you the creeps, like Steve Bukimi's exactly. Um. So bukimi probably more should be should have been translated

the Eerie Valley. But by the time an actual official translation that um Mori signed off on came out in two thousand twelve, the cat was out of the bag. Everybody knew of it as the Uncanny Valley, and there's no way anybody who's gonna come back and be like, no, no, no, everybody stop calling it that. It's now the Eerie Valley. Okay, right, all right, And it may be one of those things where we're so used to uncanny Valley now that it's hard to imagine eerie Valley. But right, I think that

was the issue. Yeah, Like, nobody's gonna go along with that. So this graph, like I said, it starts off on that left hand side, and this is where you have things that are super robotic. Um like you know, a packaging robot in a factory, um that you know, apparently most people don't have funness for I do because I love mechanical processes, um right, right, Okay, So there's there's part of the problem. It's like that's not necessarily the kind of feeling that massa Hiro Morty was talking about.

He was like, yeah, yeah, you're interested in robotics and robotic arms and the industrial processes, and you love watching how it's made. Right. What he was talking about was more like how it resembles a human and then how it makes you feel in relation to its resemblance of a human. Right. Well, in that case, it makes me feel nothing because it doesn't look at all like a human. Right, Okay, So that would be at about the origin of the graph.

It has no resemblance to a human really, and it's not a listening any real affinity in you at all as far as it looking like a human, right, but lots of affinity as a thing that's just that's called props. So you go a little bit further on the graph and then you have things like um little stuffed animals and uh no. C three po is is a common one that's mentioned because C three p O UM, you know, is built to look like a human. He does a great robot. It talks like a human and acts like

a human. But when it comes to that face, and as we'll see, the face is kind of the key to all this um. For the most part, C three po looks nothing like a human in the face. So everything is still good and people love C three po. Right, So if you're looking at the graph, C three p o is going up in human likeness because he kind of you know, he's got some some commonality there, and we're feeling affinity for him based on that human likeness.

So it's he's going up. Okay, We're going everything's going pretty well so far, right, Chuck, that's right, Okay, So then we're gonna start hitting some areas where things start looking a little more human, a lot more human, I would say than c three p o, like say the characters in mo Wanna or Frozen, uh picks our characters that kind of thing where where they look like they're supposed to be human, like they're based on human, but they have very exaggerated features that you would never confuse

at first glance for an actual human. Right, So they have like bi a guys, small noses, things that make them cute, right, And so our affinity for them is going up as the human likeness is going up. Again, things are going really well so far, that's right, because in Mowanna and Frozen they look a little bit more like people, and we like them a lot more for

that reason. And then, like you said earlier, out of nowhere, the whole thing, this line that's just been going up very pleasantly, and a nice little slope just drops downward, right, and it doesn't drop just downward, it goes actually below the X axis into negative territory. And now this is the Uncanny Valley, that's right, And that's why it has that name because it's a valley, right, And this is where those things like really really life like androids live,

or um corpses live, or zombies live. Because Maury he he had the idea that if something's moving, is even creepier than something similar to it that's not moving. So he actually created two lines on this graph, one for things that are animate and one for things that are inanimate. So if you look at this uncanny valley on the inanimate line, the non moving line, you've got corpses are

at the bottom of it. But if you look at the animate line, it's even it dips even further below than the inanimate line, and at the bottom of those are zombies. So dead people up and moving around and saying brains is as creepy as it gets as far as this graph is concerned. Yeah, and he Maria wasn't the only one that um earns yinch that we talked about. The German psychiatrists. Uh. He also talked about the fact that if you are looking at something that should not

be moving and it moves. Um, I mean, I think we can all agree that a baby doll that suddenly turns its head and looks at you probably one of the creepier things you can witness, right, you know, Yeah, it's about as creepy as it gets or um, have you ever been to an open casket funeral? A few? I'm not a fan at all. No, it is it makes sense. You know, we've really kind of closed or put a lot of space in between us and death, way more than we used to have in like the

nineteenth century sit up with the dead. Sure, right, so this seems to be like kind of a holdover from that. But if you've ever been to uh an open casket funeral and have just stared at the corpse long enough, like maybe it's arm or it's fingers or something, your brain is so anticipating that they it's about to start moving that sometimes you can creep yourself out and and make yourself think you did actually see it move. You'll

also be asked to leave the funeral. Well you shouldn't be like giving a commentary about this out loud, but you can. You know, you can do it to pass the time in the funeral if you're looking to to kill some time. Uh So, here's the thing with all this, Um, we know this happens because everyone kind of has this feeling, but no one and all this research has been done, and no one is exactly sure why this happens. So, uh, Maury's essay and especially once it was translated, Um, a

lot of research started happening in this area. And uh, it's problematic though, because there are there are a few different problems. One is, well, it's it's subjective. This dependent variable, whether you have an affinity for something is very subjective, so it's hard to kind of nail that down scientifically, right, all right, So the number two is human likeness, right, this is the independent variable. And if you have human likeness, like what does that mean? Like what looks human? What

doesn't look human? But we haven't pinned that down. So like, if you can't pin the dependent variable down and the independent variable down, it makes it really tough to study correct. And then there's a third one too. I love this one. Yeah. The third one is, uh, you know, the original hypothesis.

It doesn't have a mathematical model that like really specifies the shape of this curve, so it's still hypothetical, I guess, right, Which means that so if you look at Mori's graph, it was he just basically made a line, right, It wasn't based on any studies he'd done. The whole thing

was really an essay more than anything else. UM. So, researchers who are trying to seriously study the scientifically have nothing that they're actually trying to place their findings against, which leads to uh put it puts them at risk

for what's called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. Greatest name fallacy around and um it's it's based on the idea that if you take a sharpshooter in Texas and have them shoot at the side of a barn a bunch of times, some of them are inevitably going to hit the barn, and then the Texas sharpshooter walks up and then draws the bull's eye around the bullets that he already sunk into the side of the barn. That's the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

It's ignoring data like the ones where he missed the barn in favor of ones that fall into what you're looking for, the bullet holes in the barn. You could do the same thing with the um data that you get from testing the Uncanny Valley if you have no

model to fit it into already. Yeah, I think they would have done better if they would have just instead of trying to prove something, uh, to maybe just research and call it a thought experiment, you know, right, But people are taking it seriously and we'll we'll talk about some of this research right after this, chuck. Alright, So we're back. And despite the fact that this is really tough to study, it's not even established that it's a

real thing in everyone's mind. By the way, Um, there there are people out there who are really studying the Uncanny Valley and trying to pin it down. Yeah. One of these people is at Dartmouth College psychologists. And I didn't look up there mascot, the the the pub darts, the fighting pub darts at Dartmouth College. We're gonna hear from Dartmouth. But her name is Talia Wheatley. Um. And she's done some research and has found that it's not

just like some uniquely Western thing or American thing. It's kind of all over the world. She studied tribes and Cambodia and they have the same sensitivities to these things that look human but aren't human. Uh. And they've even found that and I think it kind of all comes down to the eyes. But they found just looking at the eye can be enough. Yeah, Um, somebody can tell whether it's a human or not just looking at a picture of the eye, right. Yeah. And that's where I

think people lose credibility. And and we'll talk about movies and sculpture and all that stuff, but they just never get you can't get the eyes right, Like, you can't put life in lifeless eyes? How are they try? Only God can? Uh? And there was this other experiment where they, um, you know, like where you can morph a face, uh digitally or whatever like that Michael Jackson Black or White video. Yeah.

I think some people are creeped out by that even but they would show this dull image and it would morph into a human face. And basically they would have people mark where they where they thought that it would look more human than doll and it you know, it landed about the mark as far as morphing into human, which I mean you can't really apply that necessarily, but just it's interesting. Offhand point is about where the Uncanny

Valley happened in Maury's mind. Yeah, I would think it would be higher than that, but um, yeah, it's still super interesting. Um. And you were saying that the eyes, and that's what you're betting on is that it's going

to turn out to be the eyes, right. So, trying to investigate what constitutes human likeness, there's a researcher named Angela Tinwell, and she basically says, like, yes, it's all about the upper facial features and that we we detect those, we we read those, and so if there's any anything that's even just slightly off in like you know, the eyes, or the brows or the wrinkles, that form um that will lead to the uncanny valley that's the creeping part

or the smile too. She also says, well, yeah, and all these things kind of come down to evolution, and her point is like, you can't battle millions of years of evolution that his honed are our dumb, little human brain to detect something that's off about a face. Uh, it's just too much to overcome. Basically, this other researcher named Carl F. McDorman, who's from the University of Indiana,

who actually he's basically like dedicated his career to this. Now. Um, he found that certain kinds of people if you do like a personality inventory before testing for uncanny Valley sensitivity, some types of people are predictably more sensitive to the Uncanny Valley than others. Specifically, he found that very religious people that makes total sense. Yeah, neurotic people, um, and uh,

people with high sensitivity to animal reminders. It's basically anything that reminds you that, hey, you're super civilized and you drive a car and you know how to play poker. Um, but you're still an animal, just as much as that ape over there is an animal reminder. Um. People who are sensitive to that kind of thing tend to go off on the uncanny Valley as well. And then people who are anxious are more likely to experience the uncanny

Valley as far as McDorman is concerned. Yeah, that interesting makes sense too, because they're probably just more prone to be I don't know, just have a reaction to a lot of things like this. Right. But but we should say the science and all this, the fact that the independent and the dependent variable are still not defined, the science is this. This is like the scientific equivalent of

that backward over the head half court basketball shot. Yeah, that's the level of science that these people are carrying out at this point because they're they're a lot of them sadly are conducting experiments based on something that again doesn't have a set dependent or independent variable. So how

can you do that? As my question, Well, yeah, I mean because in each experiment, they're going to be using different uh stimuli, um, different faces, whether it's a doll or a wax figure or a c g I character, And then they're gonna be doing different things and have different expressions, and each person has their own subjective takes, so it is very tough thing to kind of nail down. Yeah, And I think some of them are actually trying to form the basis of this field of study right now,

they're doing the groundwork. But I think some of them also are like just chasing headlines, Like there's no better way to get get into the media cycle with your study than than releasing some five endings on the Uncanny Valley people just love. Uh. One thing I thought was interesting was, um, at Princeton they tried this with monkeys and they found the same thing happened when they had these realistic looking but fake monkey faces. The monkeys were

like it turned away. Um. It did make me think though, like all the you've seen these situations where like an orphaned animal has a a creepy puppet mother. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about, and they seem to like that. But however, and this is a bit of a spoiler, but um, towards the end of this article, it points out that human babies don't have this reaction at first either, and that it's kind of learned. So

maybe that explains it. Maybe with the animals, I know you're talking about that that cage, Like, why are monkey mother? It's super creepy? Is it? Black and white photo? Well, no, I mean they do it. There's all kinds of animals. Well, they'll they have like a fake tiger or a fake duck or whatever, just so the animal will feed or I mean it's usually an animal that that milks from the mother, I guess. But um, it's a common thing they do for orphaned milk feeding or breastfeed animals. And

they're always creepy. Huh. Well, I mean to us, but to a dumb baby monkey, they're just like, sweet give me the teat. There's a T shirt maybe even a band name sweet give Me the Teat. Yeah, yeah, that kind of falls into the long band named category. But here's the thing is, not everyone agrees with this. The whole thing like you said earlier, there's a man named David Hanson and he's a roboticist as well, and plain oh Texas, and uh. He did a very very basic study.

It was a survey where they showed images of two different robots that were animated to simulate human facial expressions and basically just asked, Hey, what do you think of this and said I like them? Yeah. Can you see why people have trouble with this study? Though? Yeah, he

said not one person said they were disturbed. Okay, sounds good for the most part, though, Studies into the uncanny valley or like, now, we we're finding something here, although we should be suspicious of ones that basically show the uncanny valley that Moriy just graphed out of his like with freehand, Like if you if you've come across the study that shows that same thing, they're probably cherry picking data,

we got to say, out of his butt. Maybe there was another study Edward Schneider at Suny Potsdam in New York. I bet they don't even have a mascot. They got together characters from cartoons and video games, everyone from Mickey Mouse to law Acroft and who is very attractive by the way she's a computer character. Yeah. Well no, I'm talking about playing tomb Rater. Oh I never played. Yeah, when it first came out, you know, I played tomb Rater and I was like, oh, I look at her

act kind of hut. She Well, she's she gets a lot of stuff done. That's very attractive. That's true. That means, well, she travels a lot, she's an independent person. Yeah, that's what I meant. I was attracted to her mind in her adventures. Uh So, anyway, they asked people in this study, Um, how attractive do you think these characters are? Or how repulsive do you think they are? And again there was um a graph with a dip in it at a

certain point, as you would expect. Yep. Careful, careful, everybody. So if you're if you're a robot designer, right, one of the things like even back in his essay written in nine seventy, Masahiro Morey said, um, there's there's problems

here with movement. There's problems here with the smile. It has something to do with the face, right, Um, and it's somebody else said I don't remember who it was, but there's there always seems to be a lag time between how realistic a designer can make a robot and how realistic a an engineer can make that robot look right,

and that that disconnected. Maury's mind was a big part of the on Canny Valley, but he also seemed to focus on the smile on the eyes and one of the things that's at stake, like besides this just being like an interesting topic of discussion, like, there are actual real world implications for this whole thing, right, Like, if you're a robot designer, you want to create something that's not going to freak people out, because the whole purpose of robots is to interact with humans, and you want

them to interact with humans. I should say life like looking at robots, right, because like four motor companies ever gonna buy an android that looks human to just work on an assembly line when they can get the same thing that does the same job cheaper when it just looks like a robotic arm or something. Right, the whole purpose of a lifelike looking robots because that robot is being designed to interact with humans. And if you are going to run into this spot, some people say it's

not even a valley. Some people think it's insurmountable a cliff or a wall. So if you're gonna run up against this, you want to figure out how to overcome it because you don't want to creep people out with your creations. Well, and you don't want to spend a lot of money, um to develop a robotic Walmart greeter at every store because it's it's happening like this is coming people. Yeah, there's a robot called Geminoid F or

acterroid f depends on who you ask. I've also seen he called Ellie, and she is out of this lab by a guy named Hiroshi Ishiguro, and he is probably the world's leading roboticist. If you've seen any life like android, it probably came out of this guy's lab, right, And she is starting to get out there in the world. She's been a debriefer of soldiers coming back from more with PTSD, based on the idea that they might share more with a robot that they knew was just a

robot than they would an actual human. Um. She's in a play. She stars as an android, right. And then there's Casper. There's a little robot called Casper. Yeah, Casper is a robot boy with a great cause created to help children with autism learn to read facial emotions. If you look up photos of both of these giminoid, f uh looks great and really like Ishiguro is doing great, great work. Casper looks terrifying, right, and so Casper is creepy.

But that's not his purpose at all, right, his purpose is to like teach kids with autism how to connect. But if he's repelling them through this uncanny valley, he's defeating the purpose. Well, they should go to Ishi Gurro and say, hey, we have this great cause, can you make us something that doesn't look like the stuff of nightmares? Right exactly? I wonder if Casper has been um effective, you know, I don't know. I don't know. Now I feel bad I didn't look into that. Well, I just

I don't know. He's very creepy looking. I agree wholeheartedly. It's kind of like, no, he's not finished, get back to the drawing board. Either that or and this is what Morey said, like go the other way, like just make him not um he himan at all, just cute or approachable. So the robotists are not the only ones who are facing this chuck. There is a a pretty powerful moneyed contingent of people who are interested stakeholders in overcoming the uncanny Valley, or at least figuring out if

it's totally insurmountable. And that is Hollywood. Yeah. Um, Hollywood has a sort of a rich history of getting it wrong when it comes to creepy c g I characters. Um. Pixar had their very first short film. Actually it's called Tin Toy, uh, a little five minutes short, and they showed it to this you know, this proceded toy story and everything. Yeah, it was actually kind of like the

outline of toy stories plot. Yeah, but they showed it to test audiences and they made the mistake of making the baby Billy look too realistic, and everyone loved Tin Toy and everyone hated Billy. Yeah have you seen it? Yeah yeah, yeah, he's pretty hateable for sure, and he has the antagonist, but he he struck some chord with viewers that that Pixar did not mean to strike. And they actually, I mean, this is extraordinarily fortunate for Pixarre. This is very early on in their history. And um,

they they learned from it. Actually they're like, Okay, note to self, don't try to make any of these characters life. Like, let's go a different direction, and so they came up with those um exaggerated features that we've all just come to know and love. Yeah, which was a great, great direction to go in, obviously, because they've had tons of success with that model. Right, you can make the case that it may have saved the company because other companies

and other movies, for sure, have not been nearly as fortunate. Yeah. One of the first big photo real computer animated movies was Final Fantasy Colon the Spirits Within. You should never have a colon in your movie title, by the way, that was the first mistake. But this one was from two thousand one and based on the video game, and it was off putting to a lot of people, and

it was a big, big bomb for Columbia Pictures. And but this is before Uncanny Valley had really been established, before Maury's essay was translated, so reviewers didn't quite know what to say. Now they would just say we've tumbled into the Uncanny Valley again, but they would say things like Peter Traver's great reviewer from Rolling Stone said, at first, it's fun to watch the characters. Ellipsis ellipsips But what's an ellipsis is that two of them, couple of them.

But then you notice a coldness in the eyes, a mechanical quality in the movements, familiar voices emerging from the mouths of replicants erect a distance. Yeah, so he's describing young Canny Valley. He just didn't have the name of it yet. Um. And then a couple of years later the Polar Express, which became I think even more famous than Final Fantasy as far as the Uncanny Valley goes.

But again, it's like you said, you know, the reviewers didn't know how quite to put their finger on it, and I'm not quite sure how Final Fantasy was done, but I know that polar Express used similar um software and hardware to what roboticists are using now, where it's like motion capture, but rather than translating the motion to the robot, it's translating the motion into like a digital

three D rendering of the character. Right, So polar Express was really really expressive, but not quite there, so it fell really hard in the Uncanny Valley, and um, I think David Germaine of the Associated Press uh compared the kids in this heartwarming family Christmas movie to the Children from Village of the Damned, which is not what you want. It's not at all what the studio wanted, and I think it lost a pretty decent amount of money. Yeah,

there was another one of uh. And these are all, by the way, courtesy of Robert Zemecas he really had his He went all in on this technology. I don't know why. I think he just I think sometimes you as an artist, you can get so wrapped up and the coolness of wow, look what we can do now that you don't step back and look at what you're doing, like, should should we be doing this? Because he also had a part in the Bowolf movie in two thousand seven

that was a huge bomb. Um in The New York Times said this about that people who are meant to be enraged, who are at risk of plummeting to their deaths, just look a little out of sorts. When it was over, I felt relieved to be back in the company of un creepy flesh and blood humans again. Sad and then uh, just the Adventures of Tintin. Yeah, I really liked Tintin, though I did too. I think Spielberg, I mean, there is that Uncanny Valley a little bit, but the story

in the movie were so good he overcame that. I think I was about to say, I think Spielberg has come the closest to to overcoming that chasm of anybody. But did he do it through good storytelling or through the eyes I I don't know. I don't know if it I don't know if it was a combination of the two. Um, I don't know, but it is extraordinarily,

it's an extraordit. So you know those that that that stuff you'll see every once a while, which somebody does like what Beavis and butt Head would actually look like in real life or what Charlie Brown was in real life. Right, So it's still has kind of got a cartoonish quality to it. It's the same thing with the Tintin movie. But it was like it was as if you were living in a dementia and where humans looked somewhat cartoonish. Is that making any sense or does that just make

the whole thing even harder to understand? No? I get that. So so he somehow was like, here, I'm not trying to nail what humans look like. I'm going to take you to another world where these people live and if you lived in this world, you would look like this too. It's it's weird. It's like he he bridged an uncanny valley that doesn't exist in this dimension. Yeah, he built a temporary disintegrating bridge across the uncanny valley. I think the biggest example in recent years was, or the one

that got the most attention was in Rogue One. Did you see that? The Star Wars movie? I haven't a seen any of the new Star Wars ones except for a seen the first six, I guess, but none of

the two new new ones. Uh. Well, in Rogue One, they completely bring back to life Grand Moth Tarkin, who was played by the deceased Peter Cushing, and they brought him back as a character in this movie and in the theater like when he when it first happens, he's got his back to you and it's sort of in the shadows and you're like, oh wow, like that's pretty cool.

And I didn't know that they would do that, but they they got too comfortable, I think, and uh showed too much and gave him too many lines and too much light, and then it became uncanny Valley. Oh yeah, for sure. I think about poor Peter Cushing's family having to see that. Yeah, I don't know how often they just weep during that that movie. Well, I'm curious about like life rights and image rights and stuff like that, if they had to get that cleared. I don't even

know that. I'm sure there's a backstory there. Cushing was famously mellow that he would have taken a draw off his DUBI and been like, that's whatever, man. Yeah, I think he spent the last year of his life on his weed farm in northern California. What about this Mars Needs Moms. I had never ever heard of that movie, and so I went and watched the trailer and it still was like, I have no idea what this is. Yeah, you know that comic strip bloom County. Well, you know,

I'm a huge, huge life along bloom County fan. Okay, so Burke, so maybe you know how to say the last name. It's Berkeley breathed, her breathed, But I don't know if I've ever heard it said out loud breath. It sounds nice. Let's go with that. So Berkeley brother,

the person, the guy who did bloom County. He wrote a book, a children's book, called Mars Needs Moms, and basically Mars had some sort of shortage of moms, so the Martians came and kidnapped human moms and it was up to the human kids to go get their moms back from Mars. Right, pretty cute little premise, but they

took it and ran it through z Mecha's nightmare. Mill Um Image Movers Digital was the was the trade name of it, but everybody knew it's just steer clear of this place, right, And this was like the Apex or the what's the opposite of the Apex? The Valley, I guess, so the deepest part of the c g I Valley of the Uncanny Valley, right, it was what what the

stuff that they created? It was so off and just so spectacularly and colostly off that when I guess Disney came along and bought this company that came in looked around and said, we're shutting you down. This movie is that we're not doing this anymore. What you guys are doing here is wrong, um, and you're all going to jail. Yeah,

here's my thoughts on that. I watched the trailer and it didn't look any worse than any of the other ones to me, and in fact I don't know the character's names, but there's a kid and then there's this one kind of chubby guy in Mars. The chubby guy looked pretty good. Actually, I thought. I think this was a victim. I bet the movie sucked really bad, and I think it was the last straw the end of

all these Uncanny Valley failures. Yeah, because this again, this is the same company that had created um Polar Express, the Nightmare Factory, and a Christmas Carol did not do very well either, So yeah, I think it. It definitely bore the brunt of its predecessors as well. I but I thought this was as bad as it got. If you ask me, I totally saw what what Disney saw with this one. Anytime something is marked as the thing

that killed the thing, right, it's always just the last thing. Yeah, you're right, you know, yeah, but it could have also been the thing that saved the thing had they gotten it right. You know, that's true. So, like I said, Mariy was like and every time I say Maury, now unless I say it like Morty just saying Maury, think I think of the Whigs, Salesman and Goodfellas is like give me my money and ray leodis this in their laughing because Morey's to pay falls off. Imagine that guy

is the guy who came up with the young Canny Valley. Okay, it gives a full different spin too, right, So Maury says, um, you just don't even try. Guys like you're never going to be able to do this. Even if you can, We're so far away from it. And this is the vy he was saying it, and it still holds true. Now we're so far away from this that that just

maybe put your put your emphasis elsewhere. And the example he gave was say, like a prosthetic hand, right, rather than trying to create a lifelike prosthetic hand, that that was in danger of creeping people out, which is the opposite of what somebody wearing a prosthetic hand wants when they're walking around the prosthetic hand. He said, you know, maybe choose some like like would well sanded beautifully grained wood in the shape of a human hand. It gets

the point across this is my hand. I lost my hand, I don't have my hand, but there's nothing to be creeped out about here. It's kind of beautiful. Looking, isn't it. That was Maury's take, and a lot of people side with him as well. As a matter of fact, you know, I said, I think at the beginning that he was already an established roboticist when he wrote The Uncanny Valley in NINEV and he went on to teach a lot of people roboticists or a lot of roboticists as well.

And um, that very famous robot uh a s m o Asmo, you know, the one I'm talking about. He was one of the first ones that could jog in place. And he's kind of humanoid for sure, but very cute, all white, shiny lacquer plastic. You've seen him before. Um. He was created by one of Morey's students, who clearly subscribe to Maury's theory that you you're not gonna you're not gonna overcome the Uncanny Valley. So just make these things exaggerated and non human like, and you'll you'll have

people love your robot. Yeah. I think that's a good tech. Yeah, all right, we're gonna take another break here and then come back and finish up with a little bit. We're gonna take a step back and just talk generally about creepiness, all right, So I promised that we would talk about creepiness. So that's what we'll do. The creeps such a great phrase. Everyone says, it gives me the creeps. It's just such a just It's one of those phrases that sums things

up so perfectly. It's livid as a fresh bruise. And um, we have Charles Dickens to thank for this, evidently because he gets credit for using the creeps. Uh In David Copperfield in people had had this feeling before, this sort of pleasn't off you know what it feels like to get the creeps. But they said things like eel like or clammy. Not bad, not bad. But if you said that thing makes me feel eel like today, people be like,

what the heck are you talking about? Right? I think also you would use that to describe somebody who gave you the creeps as well, like that guy is really clammy, you know what I mean? Sure? Well, that means you're touching them though, like like Peter Lori would be clammy or eel like in some of his characters. You know,

Peter Lourie, how do you too? Um, So everybody understands that there is such thing as the creeps, right, but we don't understand why we get the creeps still to this day, and again this is important and relates it on Canny Valley because another way to put the creeps is negative affinity. Remember affinity was the x axis, and when the valley dropped down below the x axis, you dipped into negative affinity. You dip into the creep the

creeps exactly right. So you talked about um Ernst yinch Yeah, yeah, I get it. It was probably the first person to actually sit down and study the creeps or creepiness creepy himself. I don't know. I think he was just kind of a neat thinking man, right, So yinch Man, I like saying his name a lot more now. He wrote an essay in nineteen o six called on the Psychology of the Uncanny and that's the English translation. Um. The German word he used, like you said, is unheimlich, Is that right? Um?

Not unheimlich? Unheimlich Okay, better, thank you? Uh? He he used that word, And unheimlich is a variation of the word heimlich um, which is not just to say the maneuver, It means something else entirely which is homie, we're familiar, right, Unheimlich is the opposite of that. It's something strange and foreign, and very frequently is translated into uncanny here in the West, here here in in England. Yeah, and he he has, uh,

he thought a lot about this. And one of the things that he noted, which I think thought was pretty interesting, was that people that he thought were more intellectually discriminating, um, are more prone to have these uncanny experiences because they're critical thinkers about the world. Right, So, uh that makes sense, Like just they pay attention maybe a little more, Yeah, or they're curious, like they're they're like, why am I

creeped out? Let me get to the bottom of this, rather than oh I'm creeped out him and then go eat the whole thing at chips ahoy and hide under the covers. Uh. He He also actually went even further and said, it's it's possible that all of humanities knowledge has been accrued over these millions of years from the the people investigating what'spah this creepiness. It's a pretty weird

and neat theory of knowledge. Well, yeah, and speaking of theories, there are a bunch of theories on creepiness, UM and why this happens, and I think they're all pretty interesting. The first one is called pathogen avoidance theory, and we talked earlier about evolution and UM, this one kind of fits into that bucket. Uh. Basically a warning that we have evolved to have in our brain. It says that

person is off, they are diseased. Even you don't want to go near them, you want to avoid that pathogen. It makes sense. Yeah, it's pretty pretty approachable. Um. There's another one that I've seen that I think fairly recent, and it's the idea that things give us the creeps when, um, when they're trying to nonverbally mimic people and so, like a robot doesn't do it, so we're like, oh, that's unsettling.

Or somebody who you would describe as clammy or eel like maybe overdes it a little bit, like they're trying to fit in. It's not natural to them and that can give you the creep as well. That makes sense, but it doesn't really encompass everything. It's definitely not a unified theory of creepiness. It just seems to kind of inhabit one corner of the creepy spectrum. Yeah, there's another

one called violation of expectation. Um, this is like, you know, you've shaken hands with thousands of people over your life. But if you go and you shake a hand and you don't know that you're going to get a prosthetic, can it may give you the creeps? Uh? And that is probably very fleeting because you might just say, oh, okay, well it doesn't give me the creeps now, but it's just unexpected for me. And actually you said that was fleeting, right, Chuck.

So I think it was uniche or somebody who said that creepiness what gives us the creeps one time might not of us the creeps later on, which will kind of come into play later. Like Ernst n basically he laid the groundwork for the study of creepiness and it seems to have gotten a lot of it right right out of the gate. Yeah. And like you said, if it if it doesn't give you the creeps later, then that would fit neatly into the violation of expectation because

then you can change your expectation right exactly. Yes. Yes, another one's mortality salience theory. Yeah, this one, MORI and uh, Freud both subscribed to and it basically said that, um, we when we encounter like a robot or an automaton in Freud's day, um, they remind us of dead people, which in turn gets our mind to thinking about how we're going to die one day. And so all of a sudden we find ourselves in the uncanny valley right, which again raises another sorry for the sidetrack, but raises

another of Unch's points. Um is uncanny nous inherent in the object? Or is it inside the observer who's experiencing the creeps or uncanny nous? I think it's in the observer. Yeah, I think it is, too, which would explain why it can go away when you when you come to experience it again, like this, when you go through that, when you shake the same prosthetic hand again, it's not creepy the second time. It might even be interesting, or why

some people might not experience it at all. Like someone might sit there and see a doll and the doll's head turns and looks at them, and they're like, neat, how much for that doll? Which means you've just met a serial killer? And then the dolls creeped out after that, Uh, this one, I like the UM even though I can never say this word for some reason, and throw po morphism, dehumanization, dichotomy, which basically as we attribute these human attributes to the

robot until we realize that they don't have them. Right. So, like, we're looking at this robot that looks like a person. We're saying, oh, look, it's just like a human. And they're walking and they're talking and they're smiling, and then oh god, look at their eyes. Their eyes are dead. Look at the eyes. They don't they don't have any internal thoughts at all. They're not human. And then all of a sudden, on Canny Valley, which is a little

bit about expectation too. I think there's a crossover a little, I think, and so creepiness, I think, especially the modern incarnation of creepiness. This is my These are my thoughts. They seem to be They represent a crossroads right where evolutionarily, creepiness I think UM was probably it's alerts us. We're on alert when something's creeping us out. We're really focused on that thing, right then. But we're also bound by society not to just turn and run from anything that

could conceivably be a threat. You can also take it a little further and say that evolutionarily speaking, it would not make sense for us to turn and run from every single thing that could conceivably be a threat before we've identified it as a threat, because we would be using up a lot of calories and energy, and we would have to find more food than we do. Would

be inefficient. Right, So we're kind of bound socially to stand in place until we identify something as a threat or not, in which case, during this period, that's when we experience creepiness. Yeah, and I think everyone has experienced this. Um. Like you're in a coffee shop or something and like some super creepy dude comes in, and if you're liking me, you're just like, um, all right, I'm gonna I'm gonna keep my eye on that guy. I'm not I'm not

gonna bolt and run, but it might stay near the door. Sure, you know, I might get my car keys ready, exactly right. Uh, it is, it's this weird social contract, um, And you know I feel bad for people that just inherently look a little creepy. Well, yeah, let's talk about that. So the was these there were these researchers from Knox College who did what they build is the first empirical study

of creepiness. And this is in two thousand sixteen. And um, it was an online survey, very little heavy lifting, but it was a pretty pretty cool survey. It was in four parts, and UM. What they found overall was that, Yeah, physical characteristics, physical traits that are almost stereotypically linked to creepy people do have an effect. They are creepy. Um, as far as as the participants in this study are concerned. So the first section said, hey, you know what, what

is the likelihood that this person is creepy? And there's like, you know, descriptions of them with forty four different behaviors. Right. Um. And the second part was participants rated the creepiness of twenty one different occupations. Um. The third section it said, list two hobbies that you think are creepy. They only needed to it was open ended to. And then the last section, um, the participants said whether or not they agreed with fifteen statements about the nature of creepy people. Yeah.

And overall, again like they found like, yes, if you have physical traits that people find creepy, like bulging eyes or you lick your lips a lot, or you know, your you arch your fingers and then just kind of tap them together a lot. Okay, it's kind of creepy, but the Knox researchers concluded that those aren't creepy necessarily in and of themselves. It's when it's in conjunction with

other creepy behavior that somebody comes across as creepy. Right. Uh. And of course, the one behavior they put in here I think that was probably universally creepy was someone who persistently steers the conversation towards a sexual topic, right, yeah, you don't, you don't do that. They they also found they also found of participants, and this is like, I think eight hundred and forty one people of them said that men were more likely to be creepy than women.

I think that's generally true. Um. I don't remember getting the creeps a lot in my life by uh, strictly from the appearance of a woman, right, but a lot of dudes on a weekly basis give me the creeps. But we we should say so. There's a website called girl dot com g u r l dot com and they went on to read it and found a thread somewhere that they wrote a blog post about and now we're reporting on it, so it's really come full circle.

But it was a threat about how women can be creepy, and it was written by dudes, and um, there are some things that apparently are universally creepy among boys with women, right, Women that are too needy can be creepy. Women who use baby talk too much, or who quote never leave a guy alone. Yeah, I just I'm just gonna go ahead and dump that right into the trash ben. That's my only comment on that. Okay, what about e harmony? I mean, if you come home and Glenn closes in

your kitchen boiling your pet bunny, well, that's a threat. Yeah, that's not even creepy. That's just a threat. Although I will say in Fatal Attraction, the the scene where she is sitting there clicking the light on and off, listening to Mad and Butterfly, that was that was kind of creepy. I was trying to think of like a creepy woman,

and I really couldn't come up with anybody. Well, these are creepy behaviors, though, you know, not like Glenn cost Close walked into the room and you're like, oh, I don't know about that, right, right, right, there's a difference right there. There's a difference between genuine creepiness and just doing creepy things. I think it is much harder for women to be creepy than men. Cannot think of a single actual creepy woman I'd like to hear from people, though. Yeah. Uh,

e harmony. So we talked about Reddit. Now we're gonna talk about e harmony. They had an article where they wrote advice to dudes. It was called how to Avoid the creep Zone, um, and their advice was for your hobbies that you list to be just sort of vanilla, don't like and even if you are an amateur taxidermist,

maybe don't put that down right. They said, it can be attractive for a guy to have an off the beaten path hobby, and one of the examples they gave of an off the beaten path hobby was collecting punk records. But don't get weirder than that. Yeah, and if you know taxidermy in and of itself, some people might say a super creepy. We did an episode on that. Other people might say, no, it's just just beautiful artwork. But Norman Bates was in a taxidermy for a reason. In

Psycho it was unsettling. Yeah, you know, yeah, and so um there the Knox people who carried out this survey, the Knox University researchers, they basically said, here's what we think it is. Here's creepiness explained. And what they explained was what can be called is the threat ambiguity um theory. Yeah, this this one, I think we kind of put a cherry on top on this one. Yeah, we really did

like it. It's just basically where you are creeped out by something because your hackles are raised right then, and it's because you haven't determined whether that things a threat or not. Right. There's another one though that I subscribe to. I think it is finally the unified theory of creepiness. I think it covers everything. And it's called the category ambiguity theory. Yeah. That was Now did David Livingstone Smith

make this up or was he just champion this? I think he made it up because he wrote about the Knox researchers and said, what they're talking about you can call threat ambiguity category or threat ambiguity theory with category ambiguity theory. He didn't cite anybody else, so it seemed to be his own construct. Yeah, so this is the idea. It's sort of like the threat ambiguity in that there is some confusion, but it's not a threat like I think this dude in the coffee shop is gonna kill me.

It's more like I don't know how to categorize that guy, and that freaks me out. And it's based on what's called um essential is um right, where if you are a member of a species of animal, whether human or raccoon or tiger, there's something about you where there's some collection or set of things about you that that are

totally unique to your species. It's something you possess because you remember that species, and because you remember that species, you possess these things, and it can be very difficult to put your finger on it, but it's just one of those things that you know when you see it, or no, when you don't see it right, and there are clear borders between these things. You either have this essence fully or you don't have it at all. You're

lacking and you're missing it and something's really wrong. So in this article he used UM the example of a wax dummy. Yeah, have you ever been to like Madame Tusso's um, I find that the ones and again with the eyes, the ones that work the best, or the ones where they have sunglasses on. Oh yeah again Michael Jackson, that's right. But the whole point with these wax dummies with the eyes is they're fixed. They're not moving around. The facial expression is locked in. Um, the skin itself.

You know, you can only do so much. And Madame Tussos and museums like that are the best of the best, and they do look pretty good. But that's the whole point with the Uncanny Valley is you can't get there and say we're fine. It's that one per cent that still gives people the creeps exactly. And that's and it sums up everything, like the threat ambiguity could fall into this, whether you're talking about robots, whether you're talking about a

half dog half lizard combo. Which living stone sites are living stones smith sites? Yeah, a dessert would be creepy when you saw it, But so things that are a threat are creepy. But there's also things that are creepy that aren't a threat. And this category ambiguity theory figured it out. So if that's true, Chuck and David Livingstone Smith figured out what is the basis of creepiness. We finally have the independent variable licked and massa hiro Morty's

Uncanny Valley graph and we can get to work. Is he still around? Yeah? Yes, when that's happy about all this? I get the impression that he's kind of like just whatever, gone off on his own little thing, and he's fine. He wrote it in v after all, you know, I mean most fifty years ago, so he's probably up there. Uh you anything else? I got nothing else? Good ones? Yeah, if you want to know more about the Uncanny Valley, we should say this was based originally on a grabsto article.

But if you want to know more about the Uncanny Valley, come read that grab Sto article. You can type Uncanny Valley and the search bar at how stuff works dot com. And since I said search bars, time for listener mail. Well, and today it's a very special listener mail. This is Josh edition because you picked out a very special one. I love this one. I'm gonna butcher the dude's name,

but that's right, take it away. It's a good one. Okay, I'm gonna call this one email from a real Irish historian, and it feels pretty good to come out of a job. Yeah maybe, Okay, Hi guys, I'm a big fan of the show. It's informative and insightful, and I find myself interested in things that I never looked twice at before. One subject that I'd always found fascinating was the correlation between the Native American Choctaw tribe and the people of Ireland.

I didn't realize that was a thing that you at all. This is a story which isn't well known, okay, which isn't well known outside of some areas of Ireland and of course within the tribe. But it's a really good story of solidarity between two groups of people, despite being thousands of miles apart. Less than twenty years after the Trail of Tears, which forcibly displaced thousands of natives, the

Great Famine hit Ireland. During this time, as you know, Ireland was colonized by the British and the people of Ireland were treated poorly due to the common misconception that Irish Catholics were lower caliber of human uh. He goes on to to give more examples, but just suffice to say it was not good for the Irish people. During the famine, words spread to America and to the Choctaw tribe.

They sympathy eased with the Irish people so much that only fifteen years after the Trail of Tears, they donated seven hundred and ten dollars during eighteen forty five to send to Ireland as part of a relief fund. This is estimated to be roughly sixty eight thousand dollars in today's money. This was greatly appreciated by the Irish people

and after the famine the bond continued. In Cork, we have a sculpture honoring the tribute of the Choctaw people, and in nineteen ninety members of the tribe came to Ireland and walked the Famine Walk in Mayo to replicate the walk that starving people made to ask the landlord for help. In nine in Irish Commemoration group walked from Oklahoma to Mission to replicate the Trail of Tears and raised seven hundred thousand dollars to help poverty in Africa.

These two groups continue to work together and to this day our President has declared an honorary member of the Choctaw tribe. Along with the Quakers, who fed Irish people to the point that their members ended starving themselves. The Choctaw tribe remained some of the unsung heroes of the famine story of Ireland. Sorry it went on so long. I'm an Irish historian, so I tend to waffle. Love the show. Best of luck with yourselves, Uh, Roison kill

Roy fan, fantastic, great story. Thanks a lot, Roison. I'm quite sure that's not the actual pronunciation of your name, because there's a lot of accent marks over letters there normally aren't. Um, So I apologized for that, but I nailed your last name. I'm positive of it. And Josh Clark three and a half stars, not bad out of three and a half? Right, remember what was star search the four stars? Oh? I don't remember. I just just

now remember there was such thing as Starson. Uh. Well, okay, well you take the in part, Chuck, since I took listener mail. Oh geez uh, thanks for listening. Um Hey, if you want to get in touch with us, you can find Josh at josh um Clark on Twitter and me uh in Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant, or you can go to our official pages. Stuff you should know, podcasts, what else? Uh, let's see if they want to send

us an email. Oh yeah, email us at stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com and have a good day. Is that what you say? That's good enough? All right? For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com.