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 a 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 colour and then trying to
understand why hair colour has such a strange effect on beauty.
There’s more than one thing changing between these images and they’re a bunch of cherry
picked examples so why do we think there’s anything going on at all?
Peehoo, it’s a logo.
If you’re unfamiliar this model: They say with human recreations like robots
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 gets 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’re constantly looking for social connections, these sort of looks like it should give that
but they don’t. So we get a creepy sort of cognitive dissonance.
It’s eery, creepy, or uncanny.
Whereas here its 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.
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.
2 things: First, saying “its eery because its 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 a off because it’s almost like a pizza? Or is 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 sit. 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.
OK, 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 roboticists or 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 colour’s 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 likeness increased at a steady rate. But creepiness 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 peeking 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 result 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, its 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 the 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 reentered 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 axis label so broad it’s
kind of like going: “Hmm, 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 just 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 inept roboticists 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.
So there is something going on, that maybe roboticists noticed.
And they’re OK 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 2 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 details and just pay attention
to a certain colour, 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 gigantic 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 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 composition 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 way that mouth muscles have to move in order to communicate
happy, plus that 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 inadvertently 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.
And you get unintended emotional results. Fear of unknown or predatory intent, aversion
to artificial expression, fear of unsanitized eye balls.
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 build a machine that dribbles 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 is 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 can get a decent sort of trend between
human likeness and the emotion response.
But the rest of these projects are all different approaches.
I mean here you’ve got people who like they’re just copying human likeness again, but maybe
without aiming for absolute accuracy. Like with these ones.
Up here you’ve got “let’s just make something cute.” “Two 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 are sympathetic”.
To “I read big eyes are sympathetic”. To. “We could only afford 1 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 illicit 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.
Mmmmmm. 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 be less reliant 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 square or circle 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 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 the 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. Broadly roboticists are trying
to make either robots that are 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 really, in between, we’re just looking for other 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 anything 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 playing.