Uncanny polish

When computer generated graphics started to go mainstream, for a while people would often cite the principle of "the uncanny valley" where computer generated graphics of people looked almost real, but the more they tended toward fully-real, the more our human pattern matching would perceive them as "dead looking" in a creepy way. I think it applied to robotics and puppets and toys before that, but the one big mainstream example I can think of is when "The Polar Express" came out and it was filled with these creepy robotic "characters". I think the Polar Express has gone on to achieve a bit of a cult status, but at the time it was weird.

Before generative AI, if you load a median website, you could probably tell a whole lot about the quality of the product, service, message, or organisation that the website was attempting to communicate. Whimsy, care, attention, detail, careful choice of words: all of these would be leading indicators to whet your appetite for interacting with what was to come. With the proliferation of "growth hacking", "product-led growth", and sameness, there's been a stagnation in the art of the website over what, the last ten years, but you could still get a good sense by loading a website whether you're dealing with something authenticly exciting or something that maybe wasn't quite all that.

With GenAI, the trend toward "trendy", and the amplification of sameness has exploded, but it's a weird kind of sameness where everything feels polished, but there's this plastic feel to things. If you work with GenAI tools, you get to learn the tells the same way that anyone doing the same thing over and over can learn the taste, the structure, the shape of the output. With almost certainty, I can smell a genAI produced website, and the second I do, I can feel any initial surge of excitement about a design that looks considered, drop to disgust that I'm participating in something that was generated by a machine and the output accepted as-is.

I call this drop "uncanny polish", where something feels polished, but if you scratch just a bit, you realise that it's just corroded brass underneath.

There's a touch of hypocricy here, since I've spent the last year continuously generating slop, and at this point I have created (but only shared selectively) a whole bunch of websites that started out as prompted instructions, and I have only lightly edited. I accept the criticism when folks call me out for sending them pre-de-slopified stuff.

The uncanny valley is surmountable. For the last few weeks I've been playing "Split Fiction" with my kids. Great game, you should play it. For the longest time, AAA games have taken the uncanny valley in terms of the pixelated representation of humans, but they've gotten around it by something that the best video games often exemplify: an almost impossible level of commitment to real polish. Split Fiction is so good, the level design, the simple story that creates the backdrop to its expansive universe, the delightful cooperative puzzles that are just hard enough but not too hard. The attention to detail of everything else around the uncanny valley breathes life and humanity into the admittedly still dead-looking main characters.

Uncanny polish is very real, and it's a proper tell that someone has not attempted to author their work. Uncanny polish is a reasonable starting point, but it's the same kind of reasonable starting point as a wireframe or a plan document might have been without GenAI. They say that editing is easier than writing, and in that sense, GenAI is an accessiblity support for those two struggle to produce a first draft, or struggle (as I do), with getting the jumble of thoughts in my brain out into the world in a way that other folks can understand.

But uncanny polish alone is a net negative. To an eye familiar with the tells, it's a warning sign that the product, service, or more likely—scam—is not to be trusted, best worth moving on. To anyone else, there's a danger that something that feels designed was designed, and that is the epitome of confidence tricks.

Beware uncanny polish, but like any pitfall, let awareness breed new accommodations, new details to pay attention to.