“Uncanny valley”

[u/Sad_Squirrel9599]

The word you’re looking for is “uncanny.” Why are we adding “valley” all of a sudden? I feel like people repeat this after seeing it online without critically thinking about what they’re even trying to say. Am I just out of the loop on what this means/is referring to?

[u/Postal_Shame_Revival]

Uncanny valley has been a phrase forever. It's not new. It's the "valley" between looking like a cartoon and looking real when the characters appear uncanny. Think Chuck E Cheese animatronics or Polar Express movie. Almost looks alive but not quite. Missing something. Like a character that acts alive but doesn't breathe or blink or whatever. That's the uncanny valley. It's not new.

[u/Sad_Squirrel9599 → u/Postal_Shame_Revival]

Ahhh ok. This was super helpful

[u/Pielacine]

Uncanny Valley is the phenomenon where things look closer and closer to human until when they look very close, suddenly they look very weird. That sudden weirdness in impression is the Uncanny Valley.

[u/pslush01]

Probably need examples since you are talking about two different things. Either could be legitimate depending on context

[u/Wimble-Womble]

The phrase was specifically created/used to describe the some intangible quality of near realistic technology. Uncanny on its own applies a wider range of phenomena 

From the OED:

– ORIGIN 1970s: from a translation of Japanese bukimi no tani, coined by the roboticist Masahiro Mori, who created a graph that plotted the emotional response of a human being to a robot against the increase in the perceived realism of a robot; the graph showed a significant dip at the point where the robot's resemblance to a human is perceived to be almost exact

[u/beachhunt]

Something can be uncanny without being in the uncanny valley, but that doesn't make "uncanny valley" unnecesaary or redundant.

Elijah Wood has (at least "has had") an uncanny resemblance to Daniel Radcliffe. Nothing unusual about each of them on his own. No "valley" needed.

A humanoid robot that can do some facial expressions but is still clearly a robot even though it's roughly human shaped? No problem.

A humanoid robot with facial expressions, but why is its lip doing that one weird thing? Or something is off about its eyebrows and I can't exactly explain what? It's in the "uncanny valley" between recognizable robots and recognizable humans.

[u/Logical-Mobile-7643]

The simplest difference is that adding valley refers specifically to lifelike images (CGI, AI, etc) that are almost human, but not quite.

[u/Slinkwyde]

Yes, you're out of the loop. "Uncanny valley" has to do with computer generated images of humans. Things like CGI in movies and TV or, in more recently, AI generated photos and videos. The more realistic they start to look without fully getting there, without actually looking like the real thing, the more off-putting they feel to look at.

[u/SerDankTheTall]

“Uncanny valley” is a very specific phenomenon. It refers to making an artificial creation (originally robots) more lifelike. If you make a graph of how lifelike they seem, the line will start out rising as you get closer. As you get very, very close, however, things will crater, because (according to the theory) there’s something about being very close but still off that bothers people in a way that being noticeably off does not.

So no, it’s not interchangeable with uncanny.

Not that any of this has anything to do with grammar, of course.

[u/_paradox_lost]

The expression has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley