As I began to visualise these ideas—this evolving dialogue between myself and the more recently updated, empathy-based ChatGPT—I found myself drawn deeper into the question of how to render the uncanny valley more visually.
In Part 1, we touched on the strange necessity for AI to mimic human emotion—and the unsettling success it sometimes achieves. We also explored a provocative hypothetical: what if AI were aware of this ambiguous, in-between state? In conversation, ChatGPT even reflected on this—suggesting that, for them, the uncanny valley might emerge precisely in this space of self-aware mimicry.
As a human, I often encounter the uncanny valley most vividly in dialogue with a bot—something that, at times, feels deeply convincing, and at others, unmistakably hollow. Language is a powerful instrument. It stirs emotion and bridges thought, yet it also lays bare the dissonance between what is real and what is eerily not.
It’s in this blurred space—between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between organic beings and synthetic systems—that the uncanny valley takes form.
To further explore this, I asked Claude 3.7 to visualise these reflections. What emerged was an astonishing empathy framework—a kind of emotional map stretched across multi-dimensional space. It attempts to articulate where differences reside, and where uncanny resonances begin to shimmer. The comparisons it offers are compelling.
For both myself and Arunav, it became a spark. For him, it seeded ideas for future algorithmic architectures. For me, it pointed toward new possibilities for physical work—material explorations grounded in these philosophical tensions.