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Pasty skin, empty eyes and slightly misshapen features set against delirious music tracks – it’s the recent TikTok trend with a dose of disconcerting strangeness.
Commonly referred to as the uncanny valley makeup trend, it involves creators using makeup to appear as hyper-realistic bots. Some of the videos under this trend have received up to 13 million likes on the platform.
The uncanny valley makeup trend taps into the primal fear of being stalked by a not-quite-human thing that’s ambiguously threatening. Modern thrillers often confuse surprise with fear: Lingering creepiness is much scarier than one-time jump scares and CGIs. pic.twitter.com/tbpUEt6c8O
— Sherry (@SchrodingrsBrat) November 23, 2023
Pop culture has long assigned fear factors and untrustworthiness to robots, from Terminator in 1984, to Ex Machina in 2014. But today, the line between what’s real and what isn’t is increasing in a world of AI deep fakes and social humanoid robots.
Here is what we know about the trend.
What is the uncanny valley?
The uncanny valley is the state of discomfort that we enter when we see something that is very human-like, but not quite.
Many people like seeing artificial objects become more and more human-like — such as Disney’s WALL-E or C3PO from Star Wars.
But what happens when they start looking too human, something’s not quite right and we can’t identify it. Then, science shows, a deep sense of unease is triggered in the brain.
The most common objects that trigger the uncanny valley are humanoid robots. However, computer graphics in video games and films have also evoked feelings of unease within audiences.
For example, the original musical film Cats, released in 1998 and famous for its melodic track, Memory, was widely loved by audiences. On the other hand, the new version, released in 2019, drew criticism for its graphics that were described as disturbing. This is because in the original version, the characters clearly look like humans in costumes. However, in the second version, extensive visual editing makes the human actors look like animals with a human resemblance.
The uncanny valley is not only felt when there is something wrong with how a character physically looks, but is also influenced by the character’s movements and expressions. “You can produce a still that is remarkably human but you can animate it badly and it would be creepy,” Mike Seymour from the University of Sydney, who has researched photoreal faces, digital humans and the uncanny valley, told Al Jazeera.
Why do we find some robots so scary?
Throughout history, researchers have speculated on a few different reasons why looking at some hyper realistic robots makes our skin crawl.
Danger avoidance and mortality salience are among a few other explanations, speculated research published in 2010 by the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research.
Danger avoidance in humans comes from their fear of corpses.