The uncanny valley
Oct. 12th, 2004 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusToday's thought follows on from something that came up yesterday, when I was thinking about the radio series The Pond. I like the fact that the series avoids anthropomorphism -- it 'doubles strangeness' rather than halving it in the manner of, say, 'A Bug's Life', which sugars the pill of insects' uncanny difference from us by assimilating them to human stereotypes. The Pond uses 'genre splicing' (a time structure splicing biological seasons and historical eras) to double the strangeness of the pond and plunge us, pleasurably, into two 'uncanny' forms of otherness -- alien species and other times.
But I began to wonder about my own presuppositions. Does genre splicing necessarily result in 'double strangeness'? Mightn't putting two cliched generic approaches together just result in double the number of cliches? I criticized the makers of 'A Bug's Life' for anthropomorphism -- for making beetles human -- then compared a beetle to Sisyphus! So is anthropomorphism a good or bad thing to do? Is it bad when others do it in a populist way, but good when I do it with reference to a Greek myth? And isn't anthropomorphism a kind of 'genre splicing' too? When we show an animal that acts like a human, we're, in a sense, both genre splicing and gene splicing. Perhaps 'A Bug's Life' doesn't aim for or achieve the kind of strangeness that would shake us into a new perceptual mode which would allow us to see -- and respect -- the uncanniness of everything. Nevertheless anthropomorphism -- defined as the mixing of man and beast in one character, rather than simply assimilating animals to human-like forms -- has great potential for doubling rather than halving strangeness. Look at Ovid, look at Matthew Barney.
But actually, anthropomorphism is all about assimilating animals (and gods) to human form. It's about reducing strangeness rather than respecting it. Perhaps we need another word for mixing man and beast in one character in a way that doubles strangeness. Following Kafka, maybe we should call that 'metaphorphosis'. Anthropomorphism halves strangeness, metamorphosis doubles it.
Googling definitions of anthropomorphism, I discovered a Wikipedia article on a fascinating phenomenon known as the Uncanny Valley:
'The Uncanny Valley is a principle of robotics concerning the emotional response of humans to robots and other non-human entities. It was theorized by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in the late 1970s through psychological experiments in which he measured human response to robots of varying degrees of anthropomorphism.
'This principle states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response of a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathetic, until a point is reached at which the response suddenly becomes strongly repulsive. Thenceforth, as the appearance and motion are made to be indistinguishable to that of a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-human empathy levels.'
Okay, that curve sort of makes sense. We like ourselves, and we like our dogs, but we don't like our fellow humans. At least, that's what the Scots say about the English.
Wikipedia again: 'This gap of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a "barely-human" and "fully human" entity is called the Uncanny Valley. The name harkens to the notion that a robot which is "almost human" will seem overly "strange" to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the requisite empathetic response required for productive human-robot interaction.
'The phenomenon can be explained by the notion that if an entity is sufficiently non-humanlike, then the humanlike characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is "almost human", then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of "strangeness" in the human viewer.'
Ah, now that's beginning to work for me in other ways. 'The darkest hour is just before dawn', and the almost-human is the least human. Being a literary sort of guy, I'm also tempted to plot the uncanny valley to the gap that divides simile from metaphor, the gap between like and is. We're comfortable saying a photograph is 'like' us. We're comfortable saying a mirror image 'is' us. But something that's both photo and mirror (like a live video image of ourselves we glimpse in a TV shop window) exists in the uncanny gap between simile and metaphor, and can sometimes horrify us as a result.
The Uncanny Valley idea also chimes with Freud's narcissism of minor differences ('the phenomenon that it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other'), or Derrida's strategic valorisation of the suppressed supplementary term of any binary.
Wikipedia continues: 'Although originally applied only to robotics, the principle has been applied to computer-animation characters. The Uncanny Valley was considered by some to be the reason behind the difficulty in creating computer-animated characters. The principle leads to the conclusion that to generate a positive emotional response in human beings, it is often better to include fewer human characteristics in the entity, lest it fall into the Uncanny Valley.'
This assumes that we as storytellers want to avoid the uncanny and encourage empathy. But what if we want to evoke it? What, in other words, if we're into Brecht rather than Method, into alienation rather than identification, into defamiliarization rather than familiarization, ostranenie rather than repetition?
The place where the 'credibility gap' or the 'uncanny valley' occurs is not at the point furthest from the truth, but at the point closest to it. When something is almost credible, it lacks credibility. When it's completely incredible, it has an odd sort of believability. Perhaps this explains the idea that someone like John Kerry, famously decorated for bravery, can be rubbished for cowardice, whereas Bush, who everybody knows skived off his military service, can seem 'brave' and 'resolute' to many. Once a thesis gets overstated, the antithesis has a tendency to rush in, even if the truth lies closer to the thesis than the antithesis.
If, plunged deep into the Uncanny Valley, it's easy to see the other as truly other rather than as a version of oneself, perhaps we can overcome aversion? It's often suggested that a world in which we are 'all brothers' and 'live as one' would be a world without killing. That may be true, if the unity is total. But if we miss that goal and simply achieve a world of 'minor differences', we're in trouble. I believe that divergence, not convergence, is the answer. We need to value our differences from other people, not our similarities to them. 'Double strangeness' might be the way out of the murderous narcissism of minor differences. Perhaps, with the help of the uncanny, 'ape shall never kill ape'.
But I began to wonder about my own presuppositions. Does genre splicing necessarily result in 'double strangeness'? Mightn't putting two cliched generic approaches together just result in double the number of cliches? I criticized the makers of 'A Bug's Life' for anthropomorphism -- for making beetles human -- then compared a beetle to Sisyphus! So is anthropomorphism a good or bad thing to do? Is it bad when others do it in a populist way, but good when I do it with reference to a Greek myth? And isn't anthropomorphism a kind of 'genre splicing' too? When we show an animal that acts like a human, we're, in a sense, both genre splicing and gene splicing. Perhaps 'A Bug's Life' doesn't aim for or achieve the kind of strangeness that would shake us into a new perceptual mode which would allow us to see -- and respect -- the uncanniness of everything. Nevertheless anthropomorphism -- defined as the mixing of man and beast in one character, rather than simply assimilating animals to human-like forms -- has great potential for doubling rather than halving strangeness. Look at Ovid, look at Matthew Barney.
But actually, anthropomorphism is all about assimilating animals (and gods) to human form. It's about reducing strangeness rather than respecting it. Perhaps we need another word for mixing man and beast in one character in a way that doubles strangeness. Following Kafka, maybe we should call that 'metaphorphosis'. Anthropomorphism halves strangeness, metamorphosis doubles it.
Googling definitions of anthropomorphism, I discovered a Wikipedia article on a fascinating phenomenon known as the Uncanny Valley:
'The Uncanny Valley is a principle of robotics concerning the emotional response of humans to robots and other non-human entities. It was theorized by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in the late 1970s through psychological experiments in which he measured human response to robots of varying degrees of anthropomorphism.
'This principle states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response of a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathetic, until a point is reached at which the response suddenly becomes strongly repulsive. Thenceforth, as the appearance and motion are made to be indistinguishable to that of a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-human empathy levels.'
Okay, that curve sort of makes sense. We like ourselves, and we like our dogs, but we don't like our fellow humans. At least, that's what the Scots say about the English.
Wikipedia again: 'This gap of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a "barely-human" and "fully human" entity is called the Uncanny Valley. The name harkens to the notion that a robot which is "almost human" will seem overly "strange" to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the requisite empathetic response required for productive human-robot interaction.
'The phenomenon can be explained by the notion that if an entity is sufficiently non-humanlike, then the humanlike characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is "almost human", then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of "strangeness" in the human viewer.'
Ah, now that's beginning to work for me in other ways. 'The darkest hour is just before dawn', and the almost-human is the least human. Being a literary sort of guy, I'm also tempted to plot the uncanny valley to the gap that divides simile from metaphor, the gap between like and is. We're comfortable saying a photograph is 'like' us. We're comfortable saying a mirror image 'is' us. But something that's both photo and mirror (like a live video image of ourselves we glimpse in a TV shop window) exists in the uncanny gap between simile and metaphor, and can sometimes horrify us as a result.
The Uncanny Valley idea also chimes with Freud's narcissism of minor differences ('the phenomenon that it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other'), or Derrida's strategic valorisation of the suppressed supplementary term of any binary.
Wikipedia continues: 'Although originally applied only to robotics, the principle has been applied to computer-animation characters. The Uncanny Valley was considered by some to be the reason behind the difficulty in creating computer-animated characters. The principle leads to the conclusion that to generate a positive emotional response in human beings, it is often better to include fewer human characteristics in the entity, lest it fall into the Uncanny Valley.'
This assumes that we as storytellers want to avoid the uncanny and encourage empathy. But what if we want to evoke it? What, in other words, if we're into Brecht rather than Method, into alienation rather than identification, into defamiliarization rather than familiarization, ostranenie rather than repetition?
The place where the 'credibility gap' or the 'uncanny valley' occurs is not at the point furthest from the truth, but at the point closest to it. When something is almost credible, it lacks credibility. When it's completely incredible, it has an odd sort of believability. Perhaps this explains the idea that someone like John Kerry, famously decorated for bravery, can be rubbished for cowardice, whereas Bush, who everybody knows skived off his military service, can seem 'brave' and 'resolute' to many. Once a thesis gets overstated, the antithesis has a tendency to rush in, even if the truth lies closer to the thesis than the antithesis.
If, plunged deep into the Uncanny Valley, it's easy to see the other as truly other rather than as a version of oneself, perhaps we can overcome aversion? It's often suggested that a world in which we are 'all brothers' and 'live as one' would be a world without killing. That may be true, if the unity is total. But if we miss that goal and simply achieve a world of 'minor differences', we're in trouble. I believe that divergence, not convergence, is the answer. We need to value our differences from other people, not our similarities to them. 'Double strangeness' might be the way out of the murderous narcissism of minor differences. Perhaps, with the help of the uncanny, 'ape shall never kill ape'.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-12 02:04 am (UTC)It's about abstraction really, isn't it? I've been reading Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston's animation bible 'The Illusion Of Life' recently, and they talk about finding a balance between making a character believable enough to be appealing but still enough of a blank a canvas to leave room for the audience to project him- or herself inside. There's the celebrated 'sack of potatoes' test which Disney animators used to be set as a sort of entrance exam, where they would have to draw a sack of potatoes as being despondent, cocky, angry etc, without adding any extra characteristics. See also the flying carpet character in Disney's Aladdin, which is seen sloping off in a huff in one particular piece of charming animation.
The early animators learnt their lesson very early on when they discovered that the process of rotoscoping, thought originally to be a foolproof way of rendering realistic human motion in drawn form, yielded strangely flat and lifeless results. The medium doesn't allow for that level of realism, and so theatrical exaggeration has to be introduced to allow the viewer to, paradoxically, distance himself enough to be able to identify (or empathise) fully.
See also the eerie appeal of the French ligne claire movement of comics - Herge's Tintin books are full of spectacularly fastidious archicturally-correct backdrops, and yet Tintin himself is featureless; oval face, dots for eyes, with only a minimal little quiff of hair to render him distinct from the characters around him. The backgrounds have a disarming effect on the reader, creating an illusion of reality, but the central point of the story is an abstract - both from a design point of view, and also as a character - Tintin is practically a robot himself, driven by the plot from situation to situation and largely devoid of any kind of personality or motivation.
Blah blah, sorry, you've got me grinding my axe here...
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Date: 2004-10-12 02:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
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From:McCloud's Understanding Comics
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2004-10-12 08:34 am (UTC) - ExpandRe: McCloud's Understanding Comics
From:(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-12 02:41 am (UTC)I wonder if part of this reaction, as described by the Uncanny Valley, might be connected with a kind of solipsistic reflex we have. That is, if we see a robot which, despite possessing recognisably similar characteristics to ourselves to enable empathy, is different enough to be classed as not like us, then we ascribe it a positive emotional response on those terms.
But if I see a character much closer to my own characteristics, yet not quite the same, it becomes not an 'other' becoming like me, but me becoming like an 'other'. C3PO is loveable, but would be repulsive were he made of flesh, but flesh which was not quite right somehow.
I'm sure I'm being overly simplistic here, but it's just a thought.
Aye, Robot
From:(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-12 04:02 am (UTC)'Once Leonard started recording for the big companies and doing European tours, he used to say that he had gotten caught between two critical establishments, the literary people accusing him of selling out because he was making money in the rock world, the rock critics suggesting that he did not know or care enough about music... One would have thought the opposite--that stardom protected Leonard from the insularity of the poetry world, while his higher literary standards won him the awe of music critics accustomed to thinner gruel.'
So maybe the Uncanny Valley, seen from the right angle, can be a mountain? Maybe the almost-human robot could have all the advantages of both, the flaws of neither?
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-12 04:28 am (UTC)This is why clones and evil twins are creepy.
(no subject)
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Date: 2004-10-12 05:27 am (UTC)I remain, however,
Respectfully yours,
Ben
katamari damacy
Date: 2004-10-12 07:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-12 07:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-12 08:22 am (UTC)Holy shirt. Yet another synchronicity. Not 1 hour ago
I was listening to a lecture, during the question period
of which the uncanny valley entered the discussion.
(writing from Den Haag, across the road from the International
Court of Justice, where Milosevic is back on trial).
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-12 08:28 am (UTC)with W. Worringer's turn-of-the-20th-century essay on
"Empathy and Abstraction" which is said to have had a huge
influence on art in the first half of the twentieth
century.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-12 09:13 am (UTC)From the craft level, Pixar is brilliant at finding that sympathetic "sweet spot" when it comes to anthropomophic hybrid character designs. Look at the characters in A Bug's Life compared to the creepy humanoids in Antz, or the character designs in Finding Nemo compared with the poorly designed denizens of A Shark Tale. Other studios always seem to go one step too close to humanizing the characters, which by the way can be a two-dimensional character, but the powerful rendering software which can so easily give a lifelike appearance compounds the difficulty.
The revamping/updating of old characters one now sees (overcooking them--throwing too many highlights and shadows and making them less abstract) nearly always results in the character becoming less appealing. Take a slow walk down your cereal aisle.
Looking at the illustrations of Beatrix Potter or Arthur Rackham (or even the Budweiser frogs!) show that it is best to err on appearing less human (or at least posessing a measure of 'unreadability' from a human standpoint) when it comes to rendering appealing characters.
When it comes to the more naturalistic end, a suggestion of sentience is often enough: just throw a waistcoat on a beetle.
W
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From:anthropomorphism or metamophosis?
From:Re: anthropomorphism or metamophosis?
From:Re: anthropomorphism or metamophosis?
From:Re: anthropomorphism or metamophosis?
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Date: 2004-10-12 01:28 pm (UTC)something to do with...
Date: 2004-10-12 02:42 pm (UTC)sitting on the toilet in my youth looking at all the grotesques emerging from the early 70's patterned carpet design... & wood grain... & woodchip wallpaper...
if i could collect my scattered thoughts i'd say something coherently articulate...
as it is - I'm over tired (as usual) & going to bed in a minute
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-12 03:13 pm (UTC)My what a big Soul you have
Date: 2004-10-12 05:01 pm (UTC)On the flip side, a large amount of the 3D animation innovations are happening in Japan as well. The theatrical movie "Final Fantasy" (which I believe to have been a joint effort between the U.S. and Japan) pushed the envelope for realistic 3d rendered human characters. Hair, skin, eyes, hands, all were rendered more "realistically" than ever before. However, I don't think the movie did well, and I think one of the criticisms was the animation. Is having the technology to render near human features (in any medium) reason enough to want to try?
On a slightly different track, but still on the subject of Japan, how can Japan exist as a peaceful, yet largely uniform nation if "a world of minor differences" leads to trouble? Don't the Japanese value their similarities and traditions (religion, ceremonies, etc)?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-13 12:26 am (UTC)Bravo, and thank you. Many juicy concepts here, and good information.
As you point out, perhaps once a robot seems largely human, it triggers the common feeling of aversion that many have for their fellow man. I think that most people are not accustomed to thinking in terms of more than 'utlanning' or 'framling', so if something comes along that seems mostly human but still throws a lot of curve balls, they jump straight to 'varelse', eg. from "Speaker for the Dead" to "Dawn of the Dead". "It's gonna get me!!"
*****************ObExplanatoryNote***********************
A fictional Nordic philosopher in Orson Scott Card's "Ender" series described gradations of relation called the Hierarchy of Exclusion, roughly as follows: (and yes, I know Card has some sucky political beliefs, but don't throw away the good bits with the rubbish or the bad guys win).
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From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2004-10-13 12:49 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-14 12:51 am (UTC)-tomas
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-14 06:36 pm (UTC)I think anthropomorphism is endemic to humans. My guess is that it's a side effect of our finely honed capacity to 'read' other humans.
Several people have brought up Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and I think it's apt. McCloud points out that people anthropomorphize EVERYTHING - a wallsocket suddenly becomes a face, my phone assumes human qualities, the pin on my desk becomes an ice skater, etc.
Also, I don't remember the study, but someone showed that we have a predilection to release endorphins when we see creatures with big heads and big eyes - i.e., babies, puppies, etc.
Abstrcation allows for anthropomorphism. Cuteness makes us smile. Pixar, most American cartoons, and most anime aims at those two hallmarks (cuteness and abstraction), but I would argue that most animation is anthropomorphic - even repulisve animation like the stuff from the Brother's Quay, Tetsu: The Iron Man, or Jan Svankmajer is deeply absorbing and fascinating. When the pipes in Tetsu are crawling into the protagonist's leg, they've become, at least for me, anthropomorphized. Even blobby creatures like the Schmoo from Herculoid and Meatwad from Aqua Teen Hunger Force are accessable not because of their difference from humanity, but because of their abstracted and simple smiling face.
I also don't know if The Uncanny Valley is useful outside of RL robots... In animation everything is both uncanny and full of potential. Everything can possibly dance and sing and/or scare. Everything comes alive but the motion, no matter how strange, is immediately accessible because of the bounds in which it is shown.
In RL (and excluding attempts at human verisimilitude) the things that are creepiest are the least human: insects, deep-sea fish, mutated or deformed animals.
Anyway... just some random thoughts.
Yaba. Daba. Doo.
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2004-10-14 07:05 pm (UTC) - Expand