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On Game AI In The Uncanny Valley
An anonymous reader writes "Normally, the Uncanny Valley theory is used to critique graphical realism in games, but it also applies to AI. Therefore, designer David Hayward examines AI's Uncanny Valley over at Gamasutra, citing games from Valve's Half-Life 2 to the interactive drama Façade." From the article: 'There's a small minority of people who are consistently strange in particular ways... I don't mean to pick on them as a group; nearly all of us dip into such behavior sometimes, perhaps when we're upset, out of sorts, or drunk. Relative and variable as our social skills are, AI is nowhere near such a sophisticated level of interactive ability. It is, however, robotic. Monstrous and sometimes unintentionally comedic; the intersection of broken AI and spooky people is coming.'"
Elmo on fire
liqbase
One of the things which people don't mention about the uncanny valley, is that the valley moves. What seems uncannily human to our parents, was normal to us. What's uncanny to us, will look artificial to our kids.
As our technology improves to create better and better artificial representations, our ability to detect them does as well.
The ______ Agenda
I suspect that consultation with and evaluation by psychology departments may become relevant to game AI in the coming years, given that they're the most comprehensive resource in existence on human behavior
:)
I disagree with this. I think in the future, game programmers won't have to go as far as the psychology departments of their nearest schools. They'll just have to walk over to the nearest cubicle and talk to the animators working on the game. As game models have become more and more complex, companies are using more and more motion capture to capture action sequences, but animators (especially good ones) are trained to make a non-living 3d model imitate human behavior. There's over 50 years of research done for animation by animators on how to bring life to drawings and 3d models in motion - which is something that can be directly transferred over into programming terms as opposed to a research paper on a psychological disorder. An animator can tell you when to make a character blink in order for it to appear more realistic; a psychologist, not so much.
btw, IAAA (I am an animator) so I'm slightly biased
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
The game the writer keeps talking about "Facade," invites the player to play multiple run-throughs. The writer then is creep-out by the "robotic" behavior that surfaces. Since without a time machine it is impossible to view humans in the same way, how do we know we would fair better. Bill Murry's character in the movie "Groundhog Day" seemed to develop a view of his fellow man not different than the view expressed by the writer of this article.
I agree, especially with the people!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
>> [...] the intersection of broken AI and spooky people is coming.
Ever "talk" with Eliza?
That's a broken personality right there...
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
The author is missing the point of the uncanny valley. The point of the uncanny valley is the dip. If you have a non-realistic pixar-like character (The Incredibles), you empathise with them. If you have a more realistic, but not good enough character, the character gets creepier (Polar Express). Then, when it gets really good, you can empathise with them again (Hugo Weaving, i.e. Agent Smith, in the Matrix Sequels).
The author basically says "AI is hard". But he doesn't make any real argument as to there being some "valley" where as the characters get less realistic they act more believably, and as they get more realistic, they also act more believably. A much more accurate title would be "AI is a steep hill".
The catch, of course, is that all this animation comes at a pretty huge cost in time. It takes teams of animators countless hours to generate all that animation.
I keep thinking that procedural animation is going to be the next big thing. Instead of rigid animations, we'll see rules governing the position of each limb and how they interact with the world and other characters. It's expensive in terms of CPU processing power, but it allows for a far more natural interaction with the environment. There's a movie of the new Indiana Jones game that shows this off nicely.
My dream, as a hobbyist game developer, is to have animation and text to voice systems get to the point where I can do a lot of the work myself. As it is, coordinating voice actors and model animation takes a huge chunk of time.
I still call bull. I was one of those who quoted the Uncanny Valley left and right, but, sorry, I'm more and more convinced that it's so much bullshit it could fertilize a few acres. There is no one-dimension axis measuring likeness to human.
E.g., let's take two sets of models which were both in the "uncanny valley" if it exists. On one end you have the extremely detailed models of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and on the other the models of EQ2 which a _lot_ of people described as "lifeless", "sterile" or other such euphemisms. I'm one of those. In fact I'd call them just disturbingly wrong, the kind where your subconscious keeps snapping out of suspension of disbelief screaming "that's not a tree!" and "that's not a human!" If an uncanny valley exists, then they're in the uncanny valley too, right?
Then something that falls in between those two points should be in the uncanny valley too, right?
Well, wrong. Oblivion for example was a lot easier to swallow than either, although detail-level-wise it's between the two.
That's called a Reductio ad absurdum proof, where assuming X leads to the false conclusion Y.
Furthermore, if you've actually read the Uncanny Valley theory, the examples used are blatantly bogus hand-waving. E.g., yes, a zombie is disturbing, but it's bogus to claim that it's purely for aesthetic or "how much it resembles humans" reasons. There's a whole bunch of cultural and emotional meaning tied to that, and claiming that it trips people's fears just because of the "uncanny valley" effect, is like claiming that you fear a car coming at you just because the headlights look sorta uncanny like eyes.
And again, you can do a reductio ad absurdum there. The Undead in WoW are the most disturbing visually, the characters in Spirits Within are uncanny valley too, so something in between should be in the Uncanny Valley too. Yet the Wow humans and elves are considered the races that look good.
In fact the zombies are the perfect counter-example all by themselves. If lowering realism moves something out of the uncanny valley (e.g., lower polycount characters in games are less disturbing than the characters in The Spirits Within), then it should do the same for zombies. It doesn't. They're still repulsive even at Quake 1 polycounts.
Or if slight imperfections like in Spirits Within, or details like teeth on a vampire, are what makes them disturbing via an Uncanny Valley effect... then how about pointy ears on elves? Shouldn't Legolas cause the same effect? Well, bummer, he doesn't.
Etc, etc, etc.
The Uncanny Valley is one of those things that makes sense only as long as you don't actually use your brains.
Yes, there are all sorts of ways in which being different or acting not-right can trip people's suspension of disbelief. That much is obvious. But there is no single dimension measuring it, and no single Uncanny Valley graph. There are thousands of factors which can be right or awfully wrong or somewhere in between, and thousands of fears, beliefs, expectations that can be tripped by it. You can't take the average and use it as the X axis for an uncanny valley graph, because even if the average is 99% right (hence the whole should be on the right side of the valley), one single detail (e.g., "omg, they're zombies") which can be disturbing on its own.
E.g., The Spirits Within wasn't just "a littel off", it had outright bad acting. That's what tripped people's suspension of disbelief. There was no uncanny valley effect, no overall being just a little off, it's just what you'd get with human actors acting badly.
It also overlooks the problem of expectations. The Spirits Within is wrong because you expect them to be human, Toy Story or Oblivion aren't because you expect them to be respectively toys or NPCs in a computer game. You have different sets of expectations for them.
Aesop's Fables (since they keep getting mentioned as Uncanny Valley effect exam
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Exactly where do you see a false dillema? No, seriously, quotes about possible logical fallacies are good and fine, but you must first establish that a logic error has actually been commited.
The logic I'm proposing is along the lines of:
- _if_ there's such an axis and the curve looks like that (i.e., with a single dip below zero), then the "uncanny valley" zone is basically an interval
- if two points are part of the same interval, then a point in the middle is part of that interval too. (E.g., taking the interval [0.5..0.9], if 0.6 is in that interval and 0.8 is in that interval, then so is 0.7.)
- point X is in that interval (e.g., X = The Spirits Within.)
- point Y is in that interval (e.g., Y = EQ2)
- point Z is between X and Y (e.g., Z = Oblivion. It does have both better models and better animations than EQ2, yet far worse than The Spirits Within.)
- then point Z should be in that Uncanny Valley interval too
- worse yet, because of the shape of that curve, Z can't end up looking better/less-disturbing than either X or Y, if both X and Y are inside that dip below zero.
And yet that's false. Z actually looks a hell of a lot better, and trips people's suspension of disbelief a lot less.
If you can find a genuine logic error in the above, please do let me know.
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with the whole Uncanny Valley _bullshit_. It's easy to hand-pick examples that confirm whatever you wish, and it's easy to hand-wave any single example as to why it should fall inside or outside of it by itself. It becomes hard when you start noticing that any two points you choose, you can pick a counter-example in the middle which doesn't act that way.
The whole Uncanny Valley bullshit is itself based on two fallacies, since you brought those up:
1. Biased Sample. You can pretend to prove anything if you're free to hand-pick only the examples that confirm it.
2. Not as much a logical as a mathematical fallacy: being fuzzy enough to be able to redefine the curve as to explain anything you want explained. Any single example you can choose, someone can (and will) handwave and massage its position or the shape of the curve to justify that it really fits their preconception. Since you can't put a clear number and say "zombies are 75.61% realistic", it just allows people to handwave where they should be placed to confirm an unproven preconception.
It's a pity that the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy name is already taken, because it's pretty much the perfect illustration of what the proponents of the Uncanny Valley bullshit constantly do. Any single point you choose, they can just use a ton of sophistry and handwaving to move the point or the curve to explain it. It's literally painting the target around the bullet hole, instead of honestly testing a hypothesis.
3. Often using a Inconsistent Comparison or an Incomplete Comparison fallacy to create the illusion of that unidimensional scale where one doesn't exist. Every single example is judged by whatever different criterion fits the preconception, avoiding the aspects which would make it a lot harder to squeeze in a single variable.
Well, I'm attacking just that stupid handwaving, and especially number 2. I'm using two points to freakin' anchor that curve already and show that a third can't possibly fit it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
When something does not appear human, its human traits stand out. When something does appear human, its inhuman traits stannd out. This is basically what the Uncannny Valley is about. Exactly what should be considered human and inhuman here probably depends on a thousands of factors. Perhaps being "done well" is part of it, but mostly I think more human appearance and behaviour raises the stanndards of craftmanship considerably. When you're using stick figures, it's not a problem if they don't move exactly like Tiger Woods. In fact, it might be uncannny if they did. If you've got spectacular, photorealistic graphics, everything that's not equally realistic gives you the feeling that something is not quite right.
I for one can say that Eliza actually improved my social life a lot. You just need to realize that you can do just that in a conversation too.
;)
Are you stuck in a conversation with a zealot ranting about how BSD is better than Linux, or why Gentoo sucks compared to the Gay Penguin distro? Have to listen to someone ranting about what subtle differences make Manowar the greatest band ever, and Metalica just a bunch of soulless sell-outs? Have to nod through as your GF goes on at great lengths as to what should some soap-opera character do, or such? Stuck with a co-worker ranting every single day, for two years straight, about doing the same things in the same fucking CounterStrike map you've never heard of?
Well, ok, so there's the easy "if you don't talk to me ever again, I will refrain from breaking both your legs, cutting your balls with a rusty saw, and shoving them so far up your ass you'll gag" way out, but bear with me anyway
The other way is to realize that you too can go through a whole conversation by just rephrasing what they've said.
Is that guy going on about how "emerge" sucks compared to the "bend-over-and-take-it" script in his favourite Gay Penguin distro? Never fear, just wait for the right moment to feed that bit right back at him. Sooner or later he'll give you some excuse to say, "Yeah, well, that's why emerge sucks compared to bend-over-and-take-it" or "well, duh, with bend-over-and-take-it it would have went much better" right back at him. Do it right, and he'll think he's found the perfect guy, who shares all his opinions to the letter.
Do remember though Eliza has the problem that it does it (A) immediately, and (B) quite unskilled at getting it to be a grammatically-correct sentence, much less one that makes sense. You can do better. For starters, don't feed them their own stuff back immediately. Throw a little delay in the feedback loop. Especially make sure that 10 seconds have elapsed. The short term memory buffer on most humans is 8 seconds, and it's good to have a bit of a margin, just in case.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.