When I first saw the Microsoft future of work video I felt elated, excited, fearful, and in awe all at the same time. The technology I was seeing injected into my reality was sublime. It has been a little over a week since the announcement and I started to wonder, is ChatGPT uncanny? Surely, something lifeless with human intelligence would elicit some kind of uneasiness?
Below is an excerpt from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman
Olympia’s hand was as cold as ice; he felt a horrible deathly chill thrilling through him. He looked into her eyes, which beamed back full of love and desire, and at the same time it seemed as though her pulse began to beat and her life’s blood to flow into her cold hand.
Olympia merely went on sighing, ‘Ah – ah!’
THE SANDMAN
The uncanny valley is a known phenomenon originally hypothesized by Masahiro Mori. He observed humanoid objects or automatons which resembled actual human beings provoked uncanny or strangely familiar feelings of uneasiness. This led Mori to the belief that robotics and automation should not attempt to make their creations overly lifelike in appearance and motion.
My theory is that current large language models escape this feeling of uneasiness because they do not have a physical form. Their form is still in the form of ideas. They remain abstract and immaterial. We should note that this might be by design and not accidental. The future user interface will be scrutinized and for good reason.
Sam Altman is hesitant to assign a gender to ChatGPT and hesitant for others to entertain the idea of anthropomorphizing the technology. I think this idea of “uncanniness” underpins these concerns.