uncanny valley

[ uhn-kan-ee val-ee ]

Phonetic (Standard)IPA

noun

1. a psychological concept that describes the feelings of unease or revulsion that people tend to have toward artificial representations of human beings, as robots or computer animations, that closely imitate many but not all the features and behaviors of actual human beings.
2. the dip in positive feelings toward such artificial representations.

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Word History and Origins

1970; coined by Masahiro Mori, Japanese roboticist (born 1927), from Japanese bukimi no tani (genshō) “uncanny valley (phenomenon)”

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Example Sentences

Examples have not been reviewed.

Vance hit his usual mark—would-be humor that lands in the dead stillness of the uncanny valley—by telling onlookers that his two young sons ate a combined 14 eggs each morning.

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Tom Hanks working with ‘Polar Express’ director Robert Zemeckis in ‘Here’ could leave us in the uncanny valley or get him another Oscar nod.”

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It doesn’t always work: Many of these projects drift into an unappealing uncanny valley.

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They note that it could also relate to the "uncanny valley" hypothesis, since the virtual human hands might have been too eerily similar yet distinct for perfect embodiment.

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“I feel like with my music and most of the videos I’ve made over the years, it always starts from like a real emotional, sincere place,” Greene said, noting that many of the examples of AI video he’d seen existed in the dreaded “uncanny valley,” human-like but eerily artificial.

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