Clients wonā€™t trust you if you do thisā€¦
Video (1m:48s)
Social Media keeps changing.
YouTube started as a dating app, Facebook helped you find old school mates and Instagram was for sharing family photos. Clearly this has changed!
Prior to 2010 social media was used for communicating between friends and family. Since 2010 doom scrolling through strangers ‘performing’ for views has become the norm.
And now – AI is taking over the platforms with pseudo pictures and generated video. I don’t know about you but find it all a bit surreal and those AI generated images generated from your own pictures just make me cringe.
And its seems my response can be explained by The Uncanny Valley Effect that was Originally proposed by a robotics professor Masahiro Mori (1970).
the uncanny valley describes how humans react to robots and lifelike digital faces.
When something looks almost — but not quite — our brains flag it as off.
Our brains flag it as off because of perceptual mismatch: subtle cues (like lighting, eye focus, texture, or micro expressions) don’t line up with what our brain expects from a real human face.
This triggers a kind of "threat detection" response.
In the case of an AI image of a person you know, this uncanny effect is amplified because you have a mental template of that person’s real appearance. When the AI-generated version deviates even slightly wrong expression, posture, or “energy” — it violates your expectations,
triggering unease and mistrust.
So while creating doll versions of yourself might seem like a good use of AI you should be aware of the social psychology at play when you flood your feed with your AI doppelganger.
The best thing you can do is create a helpful video and show your face, this shows expertise and builds trust.
Uncanny Valley: https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/MoriTheUncannyValley1970.pdf
