Uncanny Valley
When I was 17 I went to New York. It was one of the best experiences of my life! Unfortunately smartphones were yet to exist and all I had was a digital camera that held about 20 photos at a time. This here was one taken of me:
And obviously it’s super blurry! But here’s the thing, recently I learned of an app called Remini that tries to unblur images. So I ran this picture through that and did a bit of Photoshop and got this:
You can probably tell the app had to rebuild my eyes from scratch, right? And now whenever I look at the photo up close I get an uncanny-valley feeling because I know what my eyes look like and those aren’t my eyes. I mean, generally eyes are pretty much the same right? And yet I can tell, despite the face being okay, that the eyes came from a computer.
Though I suppose if you were a philosopher you could consider, when I look at a photo am I ever looking at my own eyes?