Artificial intelligence is currently at the stage where it can make pizza advertisements in full, so close to looking real but not quite cutting it. The final result is a video so horrifying, so ‘fever dream and bad trip combined’ looking, that I’ve just called mummy to pick me up from the office and go home for the day.
The commercial was posted to Twitter by Gaut, a shitposter. In the caption, he says it’s “indistinguishable from reality. It is in fact, very distinguishable. Thankfully reality looks nothing like the cheesy hellscape that is ‘Pepperoni Hug Spot’.
I’ll admit it, I’m intrigued by the ‘Secret Things’ in their pizzas, and going to a place that’s ‘like family but with more cheese’ sounds like just what I need. These AI things sure know how to make a slogan, it’s just that they haven’t quite nailed the human face yet. That’s where the horror comes from.
It truly is a shining example of the uncanny valley effect. Based on a robot’s likeliness to a real human, the effect basically states that humans are chill with things that look like us, up until a certain point. As soon as it looks a lot like us but not exactly like us, our chillness dramatically dips and we become horrified. If it looks exactly like us, we’re obviously fine.
The Uncanny Valley. Credit: Know Your Meme
Someone plotted on a graph the ‘familiarity’ aspect compared to the ‘human likeness’ aspect (think of familiarity as chillness). On the graph, the steep dip then rise looks like a cross-section of a real-life valley, thus on the graph it’s called the ‘uncanny valley’. Loads of the stuff that AI churns out lives in the depths of that valley.
Other examples of things that live in the uncanny valley include the characters in ‘Polar Express’, Sophia the Robot, and this robot called ‘Telenoid’ I found while researching the ‘uncanny valley’.
Let’s just shut down AI for a bit, please. At least until they stop making stuff I’ll see every time I shut my eyes, leaving me restless, delirious and a shell of a human being.
