Can?!?!?

Really? I've heard about actual studies, but I'm not going to bother searching for them.

Yeah, that!

FAIL... edit: aparently I failed... I googled this and it has a definition, my bad. edit #2: nope, not my fail, assay is something to do with metal study results, which is unrelated... So SiegeLord fails.

Also, creepy is highly subjective anyway, so any study done, scientific or not, would only render the results of the people who gave subjective repies... or am I missing something?

Well, if you'd rather they not sit around downloading mp3s all day, you can just set pirate mode to off in the settings.ini file. Also turning automatic updates off (in same file) will really come in handy when the robot apocalypse comes...

He still fails, though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley

More like a really bad special effects department.

Damn lesbian robots looting all the booty! They ruined the day already... And yes it is very creepy...

Oh god... What have I created?!

Which brings me to another question... If a nerd that can't get a date creates a women robot for... well... 'scientific study'... does that robot instantly become self aware and want to be a lesbian rather then continue with the nerds 'scientific study'?

You turn them off.

Well, let's start one...

Personally, it creeps me out.

The people in the movie "the Polar Express", for example, are far creepier than those in, say, "The Incredibles".

Anyone who agrees, post and we'll have some statistics to back it up .

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it's called the "Uncanny Valley".

Totally agree.

The original 'uncanny valley' has been coined by Mori in the 70s. Since then there have been studies here and there, some confirming it, and some denying it exists. Indeed, some experiments showed that the inverse 'uncanny peak' existed (e.g. this).

There is no evidence it is a general phenomenon. In an anecdotal example, I did not find FF: The Spirits Within or the Polar Express to be uncanny in any way whatsoever. I don't have any issue with games which try (and fail) to replicate realistic facial expressions either. In my personal opinion (not substantiated by data) I think this uncanny valley is a general result of people being intolerant of outsiders. If you grew up in an environment filled with such simulacrums, you wouldn't be freaked out by it as much as someone who has never seen something like this before.

Those would be the studies that you were questioning the existance of in your previous post?

While there is obviously no robust evidence to support the hypothesis, there is enough evidence to suggest that there is some sort of phenomenom going on.

For myself, I believe it is probably linked to the phenomenom that you get when you show people photos that have been doctored so that they are seeing a face that comprises of two mirror images, producing a symmetrical face, like the following:

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I once took a philosophy paper entitled "Computers, Minds, and Logic." As part of it, the professor discussed an experiment he helped conduct at Oxford. In the experiment, people were shown a series of photographs, and were asked to identify which photo was of a celebrity. All of the photos were actually of students and other everyday people, however some of the images were digitally altered so that the faces were symmetrical. The symmetrical faces were picked out approximately four times more frequently than what random chance should have allowed, considering that the images were special in no other way.

While the results showed this abnormality, the researchers weren't able to formulate a viable hypothesis as to why the phenomenon took place. Actually, Jack was quite dismissive of the manner in which they tried to prove some of their claims, but he was intrigued by the results that the experiment did produce.

I don't have any references for the study on me (my text books are boxed away in storage), but he discusses the experiment, and has footnotes with the references in his book Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Introduction.

I was discussing this thread with my girlfriend today and she told me another interesting fact that I didn't know. She has a cousin who works as a sub-editor for a woman's magazine, and one of the tricks they discovered years ago to bolster sales is to flip the celebrity photos for the magazine cover so that it's a mirror image. Apparantly the difference is enough for people to subtly pick up on as they glance at it, which draws them in long enough for them to start reading the headlines. I doubt they did any scientific analysis for this, but there's huge money in the woman's magazine industry, and when they decide something is worthwhile, there's probably some basis for it.