Leaping The Uncanny Valley: Japanese Pop Star Turns Out To Be A Computer Generated Mashup (original) (raw)

from the remix? dept

A few folks sent over versions of this story, about how the popular 61-member (!) Japanese girl music group AKB48 introduced its newest member, named Aimi Eguchi, in a candy commercial, which you can see below:

However, after some people started questioning all of this, it was revealed that “Aimi” wasn’t a real person at all, but was a computer-generated image, made up of a composite of all of the other girls’ “perfect” features. A separate video showed which parts of Aimi came from which other girls in the group. It gets interesting and/or creepy about halfway through, when the video directly highlights which feature from which girl was put into Aimi (though, oddly, the one who supplies the “eyebrows” seems to have her eyebrows covered by her bangs in the video):

I’m kind of wondering what the value is here — other than generating publicity for the bizarreness of it. Since they’re already using all the other girls, why create an additional mashup?

Filed Under: japan, mashup, robots, uncanny valley