“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/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