The Uncanny Valley Is Wrong

human likeness almost certainly doesn't cause a creepy response the idea that this is a stepping stone to this is a stepping stone to this in terms of human likeness and then trying to understand why human likeness has this strange effect on our emotional reaction is kind of like the idea that this is a stepping stone to this is a stepping stone to this in terms of hair color and then trying to understand why hair color has such a strange effect on beauty there's more than one thing changing between these images and there are a bunch of cherry picked examples so why do we think there's anything going on at all pewter logo if you're unfamiliar with this model they say with human recreations like androids or animations when you move from abstract human to realistic human when you increase the human likeness there's a point when it's close to looking like a human but not quite there where it tends to get creepy the common explanation is that our attention is subconsciously drawn to all the subtle ways that it's off all the mistakes and differences become glaringly obvious and it creeps us out we are constantly looking for social connections these sort of look like they should give that but they don't so we get a creepy sort of cognitive dissonance it's eerie creepy or uncanny whereas here it's so different that it's fine we don't expect a social connection so any human traits that are present are just sort of icing on the abstracted cake and this is the idea of the uncanny valley isn't it weird that there's a gap boop boop the lesson many people take from this is that you should aim for this level of likeness or this level of likeness but never this level of likeness because the human brain cannot take it and lots of people have made up these examples of the phenomena now there is something going on but these graphs and the explanations are kind of silly two things first saying it's eerie because it's so close to resembling a human that our attention is drawn to the differences is like saying a pizza topped with red paint instead of tomato sauce tastes off because it's so close to resembling a pizza that our attention is drawn to the differences does it taste off because it's almost like a pizza or is it the paint do these robots look creepy because they almost look like a human or are they creepy because they look like creepy humans people who look distressed or diseased people who are artificially expressive people who have had a flesh mask loosely slapped onto their skull people who look like their brains are broken and are about to start some [ __ ] is creepiness really about likeness can't anything be made to be creepy or at least creepier is it always because the likeness is so close i mean with an actual human we probably wouldn't say they're creepy because the likeness is so close and we would probably be more descriptive because the idea of human likeness it doesn't really explain a whole lot yes having human elements is a necessary condition for having creepy human elements you can't look like a creepy human if you don't also look like a human but fear trust and uncanniness are emotional responses so we should be looking for the specific emotional triggers some changes can make them creepier others not so much okay but what if we just do random changes randomly changing features is kind of like when roboticists or artists aiming for perfect human likeness get the likeness wrong the changes can make them stranger and if we keep making random changes it starts getting to a point where it no longer even resembles a human therefore no longer resembles a creepy human therefore uncanny valley if this was the claim of the uncanny valley it's probably sensible enough but this is not the claim of the uncanny valley the claim of the uncanny valley is randomly change features like when robot assists and artists get the likeness wrong it can make them strange but then morph that into a highly refined caricature or cartoon then add some other examples then ponder the mysteriousness of cognition which brings us to the second thing these are cherry picked examples why don't we do something like this or this you can do anything with cherry-picked examples so with hair colors effect on beauty for example we would probably want to do something more like this change only one thing so you can isolate it from other factors and then get a bunch of people to rank the images because beauty is subjective but over here likeness might be too broad to do anything like that except maybe with random changes but then you don't get the transition from abstraction to realism that the uncanny valley seems to be all about but some researchers have tried they took two images that could be on so-called peaks of a so-called uncanny valley and they morphed them together they got a bunch of subjects to rank the images both in terms of human likeness and eeriness because both eeriness and human likeness are subjective and they found that human likeness increased at a steady rate but eeriness went up and then came down so it looks like without using cherry-picked examples they found an uncanny valley but without using cherry-picked examples did they find an uncanny valley two things first the uncanniness was supposed to be about how close the likeness was to us where eeriness is peaking here it's pretty non-human looking is it uncanny valley or is it just a creepy looking thing secondly we're still sort of cherry-picking examples cake is tasty pizza is tasty if we mixed them together we wouldn't necessarily expect the results to be just as tasty because they were tasty for different specific reasons although maybe it's awesome i don't know so if these images were selected for their relatively higher acceptability but they're acceptable for different specific reasons it's fair to expect morphing them to produce something less acceptable to test this researchers used similar images but made some tweaks without affecting the general level of likeness they tried to reduce the creepiness of each image in this experiment subjects found that likeness increased at a steady rate but there wasn't any sort of valley effect suggesting likeness isn't a direct causal factor for our emotional reaction now we have sort of re-entered cherry-picking territory this is not a pure morph anymore but there are unaltered morphs where it doesn't seem to get creepy in the middle so what do we have we've got an access label so broad it's kind of like going these houses are all different prices i know what the most important factor is it's the characteristics and we've got cherry picked examples with which we could demonstrate any phenomena really so it looks like all we have is a nonsensical model invented by inept roboticists trying to understand their failed attempts to build believable sex robots but is all we have a nonsensical model invented by a net roboticist trying to understand their failed attempts to build believable sex robots some researchers grabbed a random sample of robot images from the internet a random sample to make sure they weren't cherry-picking anything kind of like they were grabbing a random sample of baboons in the wild then they got people to rank these images the results are messy but it sort of looks like the robots that exist in the world or at least on the internet take a sort of valley pattern there is something going on that maybe roboticists have noticed and they're okay i mean leave them alone assuming everything we just looked at is true how can we explain what those researchers found and what they found is what we want to understand because it was found in the real world these ones are all made up cherry-picked and hypothetical first we need to understand what makes an abstracted likeness how can we identify something like this as having any human traits or emotions at all i mean this one is two dots and a line this one is yellow and a sponge as an example of what's going on there's this beetle people have found the males of this beetle swarming and trying to have sex with certain tossed away beer bottles it seems for arousal their nervous systems ignore a lot of the details and just pay attention to a certain color dimples and a shiny surface which is sort of what the females look like also the females are larger than the males so something like a giant beer bottle could be like a common fetish but the effect is so strong that the males will rub their little penises on the bottles until they die of dehydration it's a real environmental issue but we also do stuff like this when we look at these the same area of the brain lights up and at the same speed as when we see an actual human face when we look for faces and emotions we seem to ignore a lot of the details and just pay attention to certain shapes angles and compositions but we can also tell that they're not real faces we seem to have another system of our brain maybe more detail or analytically oriented telling us they're made up of other stuff do not rub your little penis on them so when we aim to create a sex bottle it's all about the shapes angles and compositions that communicate or induce certain emotions but when we aim to create female beetle it's still all about the shapes angles and compositions but we also have the task of trying to make it believable to the detail-oriented part of our brain we need to know where those emotional details are hidden in the structures of a human body you know what are the specific ways that mouth muscles have to move in order to communicate happy plus this is a regular healthy human mouth it's a more difficult task and to get it done it seems like a lot of people end up taking the approach of copying a human exactly trusting that accuracy alone contains those emotional details but really we're ignoring the emotional details it's kind of like the first time you try to make a flying machine by just copying a bird you're likely to miss the important physical forces at play and have unintended physical results trying to make an emotional machine by just copying a human [Music] and you get unintended emotional results fear of unknown or predatory intent aversion to artificial expression fear of unsanitized eyeballs wanting to make something that can induce emotions in or communicate emotions to an audience is a very specific goal to have like wanting to make a machine that can dribble a basketball this is trying to build a machine that dribbles a basketball this is copying the structures and movements of a human arm hoping that it will end up being able to dribble a basketball even if the likeness-based project receives more funding this one's probably going to work better so over here if you're just trusting that human anatomy alone can dribble a basketball or have an expected emotional response the better you get the likeness of that anatomy the better the machine is going to operate the way you want these all may be different groups working from different faces but it seems like they had the exact same goal and approach create something acceptable to humans by directly copying a human so you get a decent sort of trend between human likeness and the emotional response but the rest of these projects are all different approaches i mean here you've got people who look like they're just copying human likeness again but without aiming for absolute accuracy like with these ones up here you've got let's just make something cute do big circles hey everyone the boss says we don't have to make the mouth move if the eyes light up with the audio and then you've got things ranging from i read big eyes or sympathetic to i read big eyes or sympathetic to we could only afford one eye i don't know what i'm looking at here you've got stoned terminator you've got it's important for robots to be realistic to elicit compassion in the user and you've got my perfect sex robot would be young pale and animated personally i like this one or this one i mean there's some diversity here but what i see is here people trying to recreate human likeness and here people trying to have a positive emotional response in the audience not caring so much about human likeness and if you connect them with a line it looks like the uncanny valley but you would get a valley graphing machines that do anything a human can do human likeness x-axis something a human can do y-axis projects based on recreating human likeness would probably look more like a human and they would be reliant on human likeness for success let's assume a linear relationship projects just trying to accomplish the task would look less like a human would have an easier time accomplishing the task and would have less reliance on human likeness for success because they're not aiming for human likeness hoping that human likeness alone solves the problem they're trying to solve the problem let's assume some circle or square or blobby non-relationship thing connect them with a line and you've got the something a human can do valley but it's not a gradient it's just two broad approaches to recreating something a human can do and then we connected them with a line so why don't we see a bunch of graphs like this the dribbling machine valley or the automatic driving car valley it's because most machines don't have a human likeness counterpart nobody's recreating a human and putting them in a driver's seat and when we see something like a dribbling machine that looks nothing like a human while maybe it can dribble a basketball kind of like a human we would never look at it and think that this is like a human that we should make a graph about human likeness but when we see an emotional machine even though it looks nothing like a human it kind of looks like a human because the task it's accomplishing isn't dribbling a basketball it's triggering us in a part of our brain that goes that's a human that's an emotion it's what this machine does but we don't know why we can't see those shapes angles and compositions that are really behind it all it's a part of why for this task we will take the approach of copying a human exactly what is it to be a human is it the skin the eyes the fear of death we don't know so we try to analyze them together on simple common terms we've created a graph about human likeness and we've tapped into this bias probably roboticists are trying to make either robots that look cute and acceptable or androids that look like a human and we create the uncanny valley we might go on to ask what's in between what happens when abstraction meets realism well we already know human likeness doesn't cause an emotional response and if we look at the images it doesn't look like it's a gradient or a morph each robot has a certain level of success aiming for a specific design so in between we're really just looking for different kinds of projects and how they relate to human likeness up here you might get more robots copying animation making likable robots because they're copying established designs through here we might be getting those roboticists copying human likeness just not entirely with similar design problems to the more realistic robots but also entering a level of human likeness where you don't know what they're doing where maybe they don't look as much like a creepy human because they've stopped resembling a human at all and definitely some other stuff but this bias is what i think is behind the uncanny valley a pattern caused by common design approaches rather than some cubic polynomial function of likeness based on our cognition but i don't have a study to back that up and i didn't do any math so keep playing with ideas truth is everyone's goal but it can be difficult to find find an idea that resonates with you did the ideas in this video resonate with you maybe they're wrong or maybe they're only part of the story there's always more to know so keep [Music] playing [Music] you

Channel: This Place

Views: 138,607

Rating: 4.8217974 out of 5

Keywords: this place, this, place, environment, environmental, sustainability, thisplace, thisplacechannel, this place channel

Id: LKJBND_IRdI

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/deaddonkey]

So if I have the thesis of this video right - the uncanny valley is not a product of anything intrinsic about human psychology, rather it is about the differing goals of roboticists and the limitations of the technology, where some try to only cause a positive emotional response (cuteness or cool functions); some try to imitate human likeness, and some in the middle get their goals mixed up, or fail to perform a cool function in a way that imitates humans.

Very interesting. I’ve heard so much about the uncanny valley over the years, always explained in a similar way, without ever seeing it analysed critically like this.

[u/RikerT_USS_Lolipop]

I look forward to the day Youtube implements TTS so I can mute this shit and just listen to subtitles read by a decent narrator.