An Uncanny Moat

Back in the early days of computer animation, the technology at the time really struggled with realism. The first cartoons were necessarily abstract, or cartoony.

As time progressed, the technology caught up. CGI now can be all but indistinguishable from real life. But there was a brief period, as seen in films like The Polar Express or Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, when the artists aimed for realism and didn’t quite get there.

These films were often critically panned. Eventually, it became clear that the cause was quite deep in the human psyche. These films were realistic enough that we’d mentally classify the characters as real humans, but not so realistic that they actually looked normal. On an instinctive level, people reject these imposters far harder than more stylised graphics that don’t have the pretence of reality.

For a time, the recent crop of image generators and LLMs fell into the same boat. Twisting people with the wrong number of fingers or teeth was a common source of derision. People are still puzzling over chatbots that can speak very coherently and yet make wild mistakes with none of the inner light you might expect from a real conversationalist.

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