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Comment by melbourne_mat | Hacker News Reader

I've seen the phrase "uncanny valley" thrown around a bunch of times. Who are these people who have emotional reactions to CGI which is not quite real looking?

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Emotional reaction doesnt just mean crying or laughing, the feeling of "that looks unreal" is a emotional reaction too and that's what's being referred to here.

Almost-real-looking CGI is one thing. I find some of these AI images to be far creepier because they look so plausible, but then the longer you look the worse it gets. Pretty girl on a beach at sunset! But there's a hand resting on her waist, and she's alone. And she has six fingers on one hand. And one foot is the wrong way around. And then you realise that she has too many teeth and they go past the end of her lips... and one is poking out from one of her eyes. And then it gets weirder.

For many millennia CGI has had difficulty creating anything that looked real.

But each advance has been an opportunity to unnerve people as they react to how much more real something looks, but still isn’t real.

I think the uncanny valley is now getting trained out of us.

We are all getting used to a continuum of real to stylistically unreal, with no more unexplored valley.

Except for the weird mistakes. Those will likely remain weird to us since most of us don’t want to immerse ourselves in worlds of uncountable fingers and third arms for long enough for that to start feeling normal.

It's not a "phrase" as much as a well researched phenomenon [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

Realism is just a part of the valley phenomenon, not all super-realistic things cause it. There is sort of a sense of betrayal, which gives a heavy feeling in the gut. To me, it's a similar feeling to motion sickness.

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