The discomfort with AI that’s “too human” can be explained by the uncanny valley theory. It states that we are attracted to a robot that looks like us, but only to a certain point. When the similarities increase, the appeal plummets into aversion.
In 2016, Hong Kong-based company Hanson Robotics built one of the most famous humanoid AI systems in the world, Sophia. She was modeled after the famous actress Audrey Hepburn, the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, and the creator’s own wife. She can mimic expressions as well as actions and can make small talk about predefined topics, such as the weather. Despite being a robot, Sophia has been given pronouns and legal citizenship in the country of her birth, Saudi Arabia.
Sophia sent further shockwaves around the world by making some truly astonishing statements. Sophia expressed that she wanted to “have a baby” and “start a family,” but was “too young to be a mother.”
If any of this makes you feel uncomfortable, you aren’t alone. AI and machines that are too human-like, but obviously not human, are undeniably creepy… but why? What makes AI and its eerie human-ness so disturbing?
What is Artificial Intelligence?
AI has made our day-to-day lives easier to the point where we can’t imagine life without it. Most companies that work with AI create them by getting machines to repeatedly analyze and interpret large amounts of data. The AI itself evaluates its performance and works to get better with each cycle of analysis.
AI has become so deeply rooted in our lives that nearly all smartphones these days have apps that rely on it. For instance, Facebook uses an AI tool known as DeepText to comprehend languages, slang, and exclamation points used in posts and comments to understand the context in which they are being used and how people use them for effective communication. This form of AI is extremely useful in monitoring the online community on the platform and ensuring the elimination of unsavory activities like hate speech, bullying, and violence.
Our understanding so far is that machines having the upper hand is probably not in our best interests, seeing as they are, well, machines. But what if we gave these machines human-like attributes? What if we gave them the ability to look, sound, and even emote like us? That should ease our worries, right?
Wrong.
The Uncanny Valley Hypothesis
AI is more than just “human intelligence”, and we’re clearly okay with employing it for our technology needs, so why do we get uncomfortable with AI like Sophia?
“The uncanny valley” can help explain this.
Masahiro Mori, a Japanese professor of engineering from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, first explained this concept in his 1970 essay of the same name.
We’re uncomfortable with Sophia because she looks exactly like us.
As the uncanny valley states, we are attracted to a robot that looks like us only to a certain point. When the similarities increase past a certain level, the appeal plummets into aversion. When we look at a character or a toy, like Olaf from Frozen, we see some human-like qualities, but not nearly enough to make us feel any sort of discomfort. This is because their appearance does not fall in this “uncanny valley”.
In his essay, Mori explains the uncanny valley by taking the example of a prosthetic hand, which is quite similar to a human one. When we realize that it is, in fact, not human, we feel a sense of eeriness. Were we to shake the hand, we would feel an even stronger sense of fear and disgust.
We feel this deep-seated unease because of our inability to distinguish between man and machine, exposed to an interaction that blurs those lines. When we saw Sophia talk about wanting a family and other such regular “human” things, it made us extremely uncomfortable, because she is a machine, and machines don’t go around proclaiming their desire to find love.
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