The uncomfortable valley: Microsoft Teams emoji faces have got to go

You’ve probably encountered the term uncanny valley somewhere or other. The concept refers to the feeling of discomfort one has when coming across some android representation - a robot, perhaps, or an AI -generated face - that looks remarkably human, but not quite. A robot can be cute, but if it looks similar to us, and we’re almost hoodwinked, it actually strikes us as off-putting. Consider your eerily sentient discussions with ChatGPT, or Tom Hanks’s CGI avatar in The Polar Express. I would like to offer the world a less important but related phenomenon: the uncomfortable valley.