Selects: Is The Uncanny Valley Real?

the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there doing the robot, which means this is stuff you should Know robot style. I knew i'd get a laugh out you sooner or later. Did you do the robot? Can you do the robot? I think I've seen you do pretty bad robot. Sure, I don't know about pretty bad robot. I can do a pretty great robot, that's what you've seen. I can't do

any of that stuff. Yeah, I can't really either. And then, really, if your claim to fame as 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 that to be the only thing you're good at, right, because if you list that on a dating site, you might turn ladies off. Yeah, according to e Harmony. Yeah that's foreshadowing. I love that one, don't you. Yeah, it's some issues with that whole Oh yeah, bit, Yeah, we'll

get to that. This is tad all right. Well, let's start at 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 are 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. In nineteen seventy, we're not just going just anywhere in nineteen seven, We're going to Japan in nineteen seventy.

I bet Japan was pretty cool in the seventies. Yeah. A lot of bell bottoms, a lot of ninja running around. Still. Yeah, there were calculators being wheelded all over the place. Probably it was a good time, 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 Morri. Nice, thank you, I have a lot of practice. And Massa Hiro Amori 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 tried to attempt it. So basically more was this roboticist 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 work just kind of sat there unobserved that article, i should say. And then in two thousand and five a rough translation of it was leaked out wasn't intended for publication, and the world entirely changed, right because massa hiro Omori had in his article put his finger on something that no one had before. In his capacities are roboticists and a human,

and that was what we call today the uncanny Valley. Yeah, so that's um the idea that you're making a robot, and we'll see this apply to more than just robots, but in his case, you're making a robot and you want to make it look like a person, which I guess not all roboticists do. Some of them like the clunky jets and style robots like Rosy, But I guess if you're morey, 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. Yeah. Then all of a sudden, people go oh, like, right as it approaches it's most or basically, when it reaches it's most lifelike capacity, that this whoever's making it can conjure people

are repulsed by it. Yeah, which is something that most people who whoever hear of the Uncanny Valley or 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'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 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 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 Geman name anst Yinched. Oh nice, I did not realize that's how his last name should be pronounced. Yinch. That's good stuff. I think I put a T on the end, but the teas in the middle. Yinch. Yeah, I think that's right. I've been saying Ginch, Well, we'll have to look that up. Then I think you're no. I think of the two of us, you you get

the German down. And he had a little term called Umheimlich that he called it so like you know, different languages had different names for it, and you'd 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 lifelike was in the sixteen hundreds, people were like, uh, 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, Moriy 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 likeness, then on the y axis he had affinity, like whether or not you like the way this thing looks? Right? And just as we're talking about um the graph went up and up as things got more lifelike and people like the way

it looked. And then at a certain point there is that valley, there's a big dip 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're not even one hundred percent sure what Morey meant by some of the words he chose, at least as far as translating them

to English. Right. For example, bukimi Right, yeah, it was translated in two thousand and five as uncanny, but um again that that original translation was not intended for publication, but it leaked out, and so uncanny Anny Valley became, you know, 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 a word like boukimi means more than Uncanny's just weird or remarkable or noteworthy.

It's not necessarily something that gives you the creeps. Boukimi is something that gives you the creeps, like Steve Bukimi's exactly. So boukimi probably more should be should have been translated the Erie Valley, but by the time an actual official translation that m maury signed off on came out in twenty twelve. The cat was out of the bag. Everybody knew of it as the Uncanny Valley, and there's no way anybody who's going to come back and be like, no, no, no,

everybody stop calling it that. It's now the Eerie Valley, okay, right 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, like you know, a packaging robot in a factory, right that you know, apparently most people don't have fondness for I do because I love mechanical processes, 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 eliciting 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 I No. C three Po is a common one that's mentioned because C three Pou, you know, is built to look like a human. He does a great robot kind of 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. For the most part, C three PO looks nothing like a human in the face. So everything's still good and people love C three PO. Right, So if you're looking at the graph, C three PO 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

on that human likeness. So it's he's going up. Yes, 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 po like say, the characters in Moanna or Frozen picks our characters that kind of thing 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 big 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 Mohanna and Frozen they look a little bit more like people, and we like them a lot more for that reason. Right. 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 lifelike androids live, or corpses live, or zombies live. Because Maury 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 Maria wasn't the only one that earns yinch that we talked about the German psychiatrists. He also talked about the fact that if you are looking at something that should not be moving, and it moves. I mean, I think we can all agree that a baby doll that suddenly turns its head and looks at you, right, probably one of the creepier things you can witness, right, you know, Yeah, it's about as creepy as it gets. Or 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. Oh, they either would 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 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 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 kill some time. So here's the thing with all this. 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, a lot of

research started happening in this area. And it's problematic though, because 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 then number two is human likeness, right, this is the independent variable. Yeah, and if you have human likeness, like, what does that mean? Like what looks human? What doesn't

look human? The like, 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 you know, the original hypothesis. It doesn't have a mathematical model that really specifies the shape of this curve. Right, 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. 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 put it puts them at risk for what's

called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. Yeah, greatest name fallacy around, and it's based on the idea that if you take a sharpshooter out 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 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, to maybe just research and call it a thought experiment, right, you know, right, But people are taking it seriously, and we'll we'll talk about some of this research right after this, Chuck, all right, 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, 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 psychologist. And I didn't look up their mascot, the pub Darts, the fighting pub darts at Dartmouth College. We're gonna hear from Dartmouth. But her name is Talia Wheatley, 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 in Cambodia and they have these same sensitivities to these things that look human but aren't human. 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, 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 in 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. Yeah, hard, they try. Only God can u. And there was this other experiment where they, you know, like where you can morph af face digitally or whatever like that Michael Jackson Black or

White video. Yeah. I think some people were creeped out by that even sure, but they would show this doll 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 sixty five percent mark as far as morphing into human, which I mean you can't really apply that necessarily, but just it's interesting offhand.

Sixty five point is about where the Uncanny Valley happened in Maury's mind. Yeah, I would think it would be higher than that. Yeah, 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. Yeah. 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 detect those, 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, 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 has honed our our dumb, little human brain to detect something that's off about a face, right, it's just too much to overcome, basically, Right. 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. He found that certain kinds of people, if you do like a personality inventory before testing for Uncanny Valley sensitivity, yeah, 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, yeah, and

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. 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 anteresting 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 there 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 stimuli, different faces, whether it's a doll or a wax figure or a CGI character, and then they're gonna be doing different things and have different expressions, and each person has their own subjective take, so it is a 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 releasing some findings on the uncanny Valley. People just tied up. Sure

they love it. One thing I thought was interesting was at Princeton they tried this with monkeys and they found the same thing happen when they had these realistic looking but fake monkey faces. The monkeys were like ah and turned away. It did make me think, though, like all the you've seen these situations where like an orphaned animal has 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 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 or monkey mother, it's super creepy. It's a 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 I see. 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, yeah, but to a dumb baby monkey, they're just like sweet, give me the teat yeah, there's a T shirt, maybe even a band name sweet give

Me the Teat. Yeah, yeah, this kind of falls into the long band name category. Sure. But here's the thing is, not everyone agrees with this whole thing. Like you said earlier, There's a man named David Hanson and he's a roboticist as well in Plano, Texas, and 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 seventy percent said I like them? Yeah, I can you see why people had trouble with this study though? Yeah he said not one person said they were disturbed. Yeah, okay, sounds good for the most part, though, Studies into the uncanny valley or like now we're finding

something here. Yeah, although we should be suspicious of ones that basically show the uncanny valley that Morey just graphed out of his like with freehand, right, Like if you if you've come across the study that shows that same thing, they're probably cherry picking data. Are you about to say out of his butt? Maybe there was another study Edward Schneider at Sunny Potsdam in New York. I bet they

don't even have a mascot. They got together seventy five characters from cartoons and video games, everyone from Mickey Mouse to Laura Croft and who is very attractive by the way, she's a computer character. Yeah. Well no, I'm talking about playing tomb Raider. Yeah. I never played. Yeah when it first came out, you know, I played tomb Raider and I was like, oh, I look at her. Laura Croft is kind of hut she well, she's she gets a lot of stuff done. That's very attractive. I'm not true

what that means. Well, she travels a lot. Oh, she's an independent person. Yeah, that's what I meant. I was attracted to her mind in her adventures. Right. So anyway, they ask 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 nineteen seventy. Massa Hiro 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 yeah, um, And 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 an

engineer can make that robot look. Yeah, right, and that that disconnected Maury's mind was a big part of the Uncanny 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 Ford 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 robot is 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 going to 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 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 Actroid F, depending on who you ask. I've also seen her 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, Yeah, And she is

starting to get out there in the world. She's been a debriefer of soldiers coming back from war 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. Yeah, she's in a play. She stars as an android. Good role. 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, geminoid f 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 now, of 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 Ishiguro 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 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 Moury said, like go the other way, Like just make him not human at all, just cute or approachable. Right, So the robotists are not the only ones who are facing this chuck. There is 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, Hollywood has a sort of a rich history of getting it wrong when it comes to creepy CGI characters. Pixarhad their very first short film actually is called Tin Toy. It's 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, so I hate Billy. Yeah, he's pretty hateable for sure, and he has the antagonist, but he struck some chord with viewers that that Pixar did not mean to strike, right,

and they actually, I mean, this is extraordinarily fortunate for Pixar. Sure, this is very early on in their history, and 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. Yeah, 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, So that was the first mistake. But this one was from two thousand and 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, ellips, ellips. But what's an ellipsis is that two of them? A 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 the Uncanny Valley. He just didn't have the name of it yet. And then a couple of years later you had the Polar Express, which became I think even more famous than Final Fantasy totally 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 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. Yeah, So Polar Express was really really expressive, but not quite there. So it fell really

hard in the young Canny Valley. And I think David Germaine of the Associated Press compared the kids in this heartwarming family Christmas movie to the children from Village of the Damned. Yeah, 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, 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 as an artist you can get so wrapped up in the coolness of wow, look what we can do now that you don't step back and look at what you're doing. Look should should we be doing this? Because he also had a part in the Beowulf movie in two thousand and seven that was a huge bomb 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 uncreepy flesh and blood humans again sad. And then did you see 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 overcoming that chasm of anybody. But did he do it through good storytelling or through the eyes I don't know. I don't know if it I don't know. If it was a combination of the two. I don't know. But it is extraordinarily, it's an extradit so you know, those that that stuff you'll see every once a while, wish somebody does like what Beavis and butt Head would actually look like in real life, or what Charlie Brown

would look like in real life. Fantastic, right, So it 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 dimension 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 bridged an uncanny valley that doesn't exist in this dimension. Yeah, he built a temporary disintegrating bridge across the uncanny valley, right. 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 seen any of the new Star Wars ones except for I've seen the first six, I guess, but none of the two new new ones. 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 showed too much and gave him too many lines and too much light, and then it became Uncanny Valley really. Oh yeah, for sure. Think about poor Peter Cushing's family having to see that. Yeah, I don't know how, but 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. I'm sure there's a backstory there. Oh. Cushing was famously mellow. That was he He would have taken and draw off his dubie 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. Right, what about this Mars Needs Moms. I had never ever heard of that movie, and so I went and watched the trailer and I 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. Oh okay, so Burke so maybe you know how to say the last name. It's Berkeley. Breathed or breathed. They said breathed, but I don't know if I've ever heard it said out loud. Breathed sounds nice. Let's go with that. So Berkeley breath the person, the guy who did Bloom County. Yeah, 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 Zemeckis's nightmare mill u right. Image Movers Digital was the was the trade name of it, but everybody knew it's just steer clear of this place, right, Yeah. 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 CGI Valley, of the Uncanny Valley, right, it was what the stuff that they created. It was so off and just so spectacularly and colossally off that when I guess Disney came along and bought this company. They came in, looked around and said, we're shutting you down. This movie's that we're not doing this anymore. What you guys are doing here is wrong, 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. Yeah, the chubby guy looked pretty good. Actually, I thought I think this was a victim. I bet the movie sucked really bad. Yeah, and I think it was the last straw at the end of all these Uncanny Valley failures. Yeah, because this again, this

is the same company that had created a Polar Express. Yeah, the Nightmare Factory and a Christmas Carol did not do very well either. So yeah, I think it definitely bore the brunt of its predecessors as well. Yeah, but I thought this was as bad as it got. If you ask me, I totally saw what Disney saw with this one. Yeah. 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, anyway, but it could have also been the thing that saved the thing had they gotten it right. You know, that's true. So like that, Maury was like, and every time I say more now unless I say it like Mory just saying morey Jewish guy, I think I think of the Wig Salesman and Goodfellas. Yeahs like give me money and ray leotis this in their laughing because More's two payfalls off. Imagine that guy is the guy who came up with

the Uncanny Valley. Okay, he gives a whole different spin to it, right, Yeah. So Moury says, um, 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 in nineteen seventy he was saying it, and it still holds true. Now, yeah, 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, yea, 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 wood, 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 nineteen seventy, and he went on to teach a lot of people roboticists, or a lot of roboticists as well.

And that very famous robot Asimo Osimo, 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. Yeah, you've seen him before. 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. Yeah,

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. You promised. Chuck 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 we have Charles Dickens to thank for this, evidently, because he gets credit for using the creeps. In David Copperfield in eighteen forty nine, people had had this feeling before, this sort of unpleasant 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 would 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's really clammy, you know what I mean? Sure, all that means you're touching them though, like like Peter Lorie would be clammy or eel like in some of his characters.

You know, Peter Lourie, I do too. 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 to the Uncanny 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, into the creeps. The creeps exactly right.

So you talked about Ernst Yinch Yeah, yeah, I'd get it. Sure it was probably the first person to actually sit down and study the creeps or creepiness. I bet he was 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 oh six called on the

Psychology of the Uncanny, and that's the English translation. The German word he used, like you said, is high aimlich Is that right, M not in unheimlich unheimlich Yeah, okay, nice, getting 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, Yeah.

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 and go eat a whole thing at chips ahoy, and hide under

the covers. Right. He also actually went even further and said, it's it's possible that all of humanity's knowledge has been accrued over these millions of years from the people investigating what's behind this creepiness. Yeah, it's a pretty weird and neat theory of knowledge. Well. Yeah, and speaking of theories, there are a bunch of theories on creepiness and why this happens, and I think they're all pretty interesting. Yeah.

The first one is called pathogen avoidance theory, and we talked earlier about evolution, and this one kind of fits into that bucket. Basically, a warning that we have evolved to have in our brain says that person is off, they are diseased, even you don't want to go near them, right, you want to avoid that pathogen makes sense. Yeah, it's

pretty pretty approachable. Sure. There's another one that I've seen that's I think fairly recent, and it's the idea that things give us the creeps when when they're trying to nonverbally mimic people. Yeah, 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 overdoes it a little bit. Yeah, like they're trying to fit in. It's not natural to them. Yeah, and that can give you the creeps 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. 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 hand, it may give you the creeps, right, 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 unch or somebody who said that creepiness what gives us the creeps one time might not give us the creeps later on, Yeah, which will kind of come into play later like Ernst Junch. 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 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 Freud both subscribed to, and it basically said that we when we encounter like a robot or an automaton in Freud's day, 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. Is uncanniness inherent in the object or is it inside

the observer who's experiencing the creeps or uncannyness? I think it's in the observer. Yeah, I think it is, too, which would explain why it can go away you when you come to experience it again. Yeah, like this, when you go through the 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, right, how much for that doll? Which means you've just met a serial killer? Right? And then the dolls creeped out after that? This one I like them, even though I can never say this word for some reason. And thro po morphism, nice job, 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. Yeah, And then all of a sudden, on Caney Valley, which is a little bit about expectation too, I think those are crawls over a little I think sure, And so creepiness, I think, especially the modern incarnation of creepiness. This is these are my thoughts. They seem to be They represent a crossroads right where evolutionarily, creepiness I think was probably it alerts us.

We're on alert when something's creeping us out. We're really focused on that thing, right then, Ye, 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. 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, all right, I'm gonna I'm gonna keep my eye on that guy. I'm 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. Yeah. So there was these there are these researchers from Knox College who did what they build as the first empirical study of creepiness. And this is in twenty sixteen. Such a great study 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 that are concerned. Yeah. So the first section said, hey, you know, what is the likelihood that this person is creepy? And there's like,

you know, descriptions of them. There's forty four different behaviors, right, Yeah, And the second part was participants rated the creepiness of twenty one different occupations. I love to see that list. The third section it said, list two hobbies that you think are creepy. They only needed too. It was open ended too. And then the last section 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, you 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, And of course, the one behavior they put in here I think there was probably universally creepy was someone who persistently steers the conversation toward a sexual topic, right, yeah, you don't, you don't do that. They also found no. They also found ninety five percent of participants and this is like I think eighteen hundred and thirteen hundred and forty one people, ninety five percent of them said that men were more likely to be

creepy than women. Yeah, I think that's generally true. Um, I don't remember getting the creeps a lot in my life by strictly from the appearance of a woman, right, But a lot of dudes on a weekly basis give me the creeps. Sure, but we should say so. There's a website called girl dot com touurl 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 there are some things that apparently are universally creepy among boys with women. Right. Yeah, 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 bend. 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. Right. Although I will say in Fatal Attraction, the scene where she is sitting there clicking the light on and off, listening to Madam Butterfly, that was that was kind of creepy. I was trying to think of like a creepy woman.

I really couldn't come up with anybody. Well, these are creepy behaviors though, you know, yeah, not like Glencoe's 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's a difference between genuine creepiness and just doing creepy things. Yeah. I think it is much harder for women to be creepy than men. Cannot think of a single actual creepy woman, No,

I'd like to hear from people, though. Yeah. E harmony, So we've talked about Reddit, now we're gonna talk about e harmony. Right. They had an article where they wrote advice to dudes. It was called how to avoid the creep Zone, right, and their advice was for your hobbies that you list to be just sort of vanilla, all right, 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, right, But Norman Bates was into taxidermy for a reason. In

Psycho right, it was unsettling. Yeah, you know. Yeah, And so 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 theory. Yeah, this this one, I think they kind of put a cherry on top on this one. Yeah, we really did.

Like 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 thing's a threat or not. Yep. 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, right, and that freaks me out right. And it's based on what's called essentialism, right, where if you are a member of a species of animal, whether human or raccoon or tiger, there's something about you, or there's some collection or set of things about you that are totally unique to your species. Yeah, it's something

you possess because you're a member that species. And because you're a member 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, Yeah, 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 the example of a wax dummy. Yeah, have you ever been to like Madame Tussod's, Sure, Yeah, 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, you know 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 the skin itself. You know,

it can only do so much. And Madam Tusso's 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 ninety nine there and say we're fine. It's that one percent 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 or living Stone Smith sites the desert. Yeah, a dessert would be creepy when you saw it. Yeah, but so things that are a threat are creepy. But there's also things that are creepy that aren't a threat in 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 lickt 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, Okay, and he's fine. He wrote it in nineteen seventy after all, you know, Yeah, I mean most

fifty years ago. Yeah, so he's probably up there yeah, uh, are 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 grabst article too. But if you want to know more about the Uncanny Valley, cum read that Grabster article. You can type Uncanny Valley in the search bar at HowStuffWorks 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 going to butcher the dude's name, but that's right, take it away. It's a good one. Okay. I'm going to call this one email from a real Irish historian and it feels pretty good. Chuck, am I 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 not 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 thousand 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. He goes on 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 sympathized 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 nineteen ninety two, an 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, Royson kill roy Bean, fantastic, great story. Thanks a lot, Roisen. I'm quite sure that it's not the actual pronunciation of your name, because there's a lot of accent marks over letters there normally aren't, ye, So I apologize 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, I don't remember what was star search the four stars? Oh, I don't remember. I just just now remember there was

such thing as Starson. Yeah, well okay, well you take that in part, Chuck, since I took listenermail, Oh geez, thanks for listening. Um. Hey, if you want to get in touch with us, you can go to our official pages. Stuff you Should Know podcasts, what else? Let's see if they want to send us an email? Oh yeah, email us at stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com. And have a good day. Is that what you say? That's good enough? All right? Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

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