Look at this freakin’ dude. You see him? This guy right here? Lookin’ like a discount horror villain fresh off a B-movie set. Gottdamn, he’s a scary mother.
I’ve been thinking a lot about faces lately. AI has mostly nailed them down, but sometimes—oh man—sometimes, things get a little… weird. You know what I mean? Those faces where something’s just off? Sometimes it’s a tiny thing, sometimes it’s a grotesque abomination that haunts your dreams, and other times, it’s just a subtle wrongness that you can’t quite put your finger on.
I’ve been having fun picking apart what exactly makes some of these uncanny faces feel… well, uncanny. Take the pictured image above, for instance. Someone might glance at him and say, “Yeah, he looks cartoony.” But what makes him look cartoony? Is it the skin? The build? Nah, I think it’s the lines. Look at that hair—too smooth, too wavy, too perfect. Now check the lips—too simple, barely any upper lip. The eyes? Lashless and a little too small, but not entirely impossible. But those pecs, though? Yeah, those are fake as hell. Not “Sick gains, bro” fake—more like “What in the silicone nightmare is this?”
But what if I told you this isn’t AI-generated? What if… this was just Crispin Glover?
Yeah, no, I wouldn’t believe that either. But isn’t it funny that Crispin Glover—a real human being—somehow manages to look more unsettling than this AI-generated homunculus?
Here’s where I get a little thinksy.
When I was a kid, I had a teacher tell me about the first time sound engineers tried to synthesize a violin. They hit a snag. See, they created a sound so perfect that it no longer even sounded like a violin. Weird, right? The “perfect” violin was just a sterile, high-pitched sinewave. Sure, it had the pitch down, but it was missing the messy, gritty imperfections that make a real violin—the scratch of the bow, the reverberation of air, the texture that gives it soul.
“But that’s no good!” I imagine the engineers crying, pulling their hair out. “It doesn’t sound real!😭”
The solution? Don’t make it perfect. Add the imperfections. Dirty it up. Because perfection, as it turns out, isn’t real. Without that grime and chaos, the sound is just… a lifeless tone.
Imperfections Make It Real
Imperfections are what make things feel real to us. Nature has this way of letting things fall into place like blocks in a Tetris game. But when you play Tetris, you realize… it’s not that easy. Nature nails it every time. And AI? AI is just desperately trying to keep up, stacking these details together to create a result that’s almost right—but sometimes misses the mark in the most fascinating ways.
When I look at these AI-generated faces, that’s what I see—the generator trying to mimic that natural balance of perfections and imperfections. It gives us real skin but a cartoonish frame. Perfectly flowing hair but with an unnatural shine. Cartoony lips but with just enough realness to keep us guessing. The details pile up in ways that our brains notice, consciously or not, and that’s where the magic happens.
We can’t always describe it, but we feel it. And that, my friends, is where the fun is.
Thanks for indulging this little musing of mine. Stay weird.